The King spoke as the chief of the nation rather than as its master. ‘We glory,’ said Louis XVI., at his accession, in the preamble of a decree, ‘we glory to command a free and generous nation.’ One of his ancestors had already expressed the same idea in older language, when, thanking the States-General for the boldness of their remonstrances, he said, ‘We like better to speak to freemen than to serfs.’ The men of the eighteenth century knew little of that sort of passion for comfort which is the mother of servitude--a relaxing passion, though it be tenacious and unalterable, which mingles and intertwines itself with many private virtues, such as domestic affections, regularity of life, respect for religion, and even with the lukewarm, though assiduous, practice of public worship, which favours propriety but proscribes heroism, and excels in making decent livers but base citizens. The men of the eighteenth century were better and they were worse. The French of that age were addicted to joy and passionately fond of amusement; they were perhaps more lax in their habits, and more vehement in their passions and opinions than those of the present day, but they were strangers to the temperate and decorous sensualism that we see about us. In the upper classes men thought more of adorning life than of rendering it comfortable; they sought to be illustrious rather than to be rich. Even in the middle ranks the pursuit of comfort never absorbed every faculty of the mind; that pursuit was often abandoned for higher and more refined enjoyments; every man placed some object beyond the love of money before his eyes. ‘I know my countrymen,’ said a contemporary writer, in language which, though eccentric, is spirited, ‘apt to melt and dissipate the metals, they are not prone to pay them habitual reverence, and they will not be slow to turn again to their former idols, to valour, to glory, and, I will add, to magnanimity.’