But if the seventeenth century has more than ever our admiration, we guard ourselves from the too much accredited error that confounds that century with the reign of Louis XIV. Surely Louis XIV. is for us also a great king. He had, what is rarest in the world, grandeur in character; that is his immortal glory. Moreover, he was reserved, attentive, laborious, capable of a firm and persistent course; but, it must be said, he was profoundly selfish, and loved his person and his family much more than France. He was radically deceived in the only two enterprises that originated in his own will,—the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the wars of the Succession. He left France humiliated, enfeebled, discontented, and already full of the germs of revolutions; whilst Henry IV., Richelieu, and Mazarin had transmitted it to him covered with glory, powerful and preponderant abroad, tranquil and satisfied at home. Louis XIV. terminates the seventeenth century: he did not inspire it, and he is far from being its perfect representative. It was under Henry IV., under Louis XIII., and under Queen Anne, that were born, formed, and even developed, the great statesmen and the great warriors, as well as the greatest writers of either sex, those even, like Madame de Sévigné and Bossuet, whose career was most prolonged. The influence of Louis XIV. made itself felt sufficiently late. He took the reins of government only in 1661, and at first he followed his times, and did not control them; he truly appeared himself, only when he was no longer guided by Lyonne and Colbert, the last disciples of Richelieu and Mazarin. It was then that, governing almost alone and superior to all around him, he placed everywhere the impress of his taste, in politics, in religion, in manners, in arts, and in letters. He substituted in every way simplicity for _naïveté_, nobility for grandeur, dignity for force, elegance for grace: he effaced characters, and polished, as it were, the surface of souls; he eradicated great vices and great virtues; he put the purely literary, and consequently the somewhat inferior school of Racine and Boileau in the place of that great school of virtue, politics, and war, instituted by Corneille; as heirs to Descartes, Pascal, and Bossuet, he gave Massillon, Fontenelle, and Voltaire—the true children of the end of the seventeenth century. After Madame de Sévigné, that rival of Molière, formed, like him, from 1640 to 1660, appeared Mme. de Maintenon, the model of the common-place, with her agreeable small-talk, Mme. de Coylus, Mme. de Stael, and Mme. Lambert. Add to that, as we have already said, the wholly gratuitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when Protestants, subdued, but protected, rivalled in zeal the Catholics for the service of the state, and when their most illustrious families were by degrees converted; add especially, the deplorable wars undertaken by Louis XIV., with a ministry of court clerks and generals, in order to put