The King was not only sacred, but he was supposed to have different blood in his veins from other men.  His person was inviolable.  He reigned, it was universally supposed, by divine right.  He was a divinely commissioned personage, like Saul and David.  He did not reign because he was able or powerful or wealthy, because he was a statesman or a general, but because he had a right to reign which no one disputed.  This adoration of royalty was not only universal, but it was deeply seated in the minds of men, and marked strongly all the courtiers and generals and bishops and poets who surrounded the throne of Louis,—­Bossuet and Fenelon, as well as Colbert and Louvois; Racine and Moliere, as well as Conde and Turenne.  Especially the nobility of the realm looked up to the king as the source and centre of their own honors and privileges.  Even the people were proud to recognize in him a sort of divinity, and all persons stood awe-struck in the presence of royalty.  All this reverence was based on ideas which have ever moved the world,—­such as sustained popes in the Middle Ages, and emperors in ancient Borne, and patriarchal rule among early Oriental peoples.  Religion, as well as law and patriotism, invested monarchs with this sacred and inalienable authority, never greater than when Louis XIV. began to reign.

But with all his grandeur Louis XIV. did not know how to avail himself of the advantages which fortune and accident placed in his way.  He was simply magnificent, like Xerxes,—­like a man who had entered into a vast inheritance which he did not know what to do with.  He had no profound views of statesmanship, like Augustus or Tiberius.  He had no conception of what the true greatness of a country consisted in.  Hence his vast treasures were spent in useless wars, silly pomps, and inglorious pleasures.  His grand court became the scene of cabals and rivalries, scandals and follies.  His wars, from which he expected glory, ended only in shame; his great generals passed away without any to take their place; his people, instead of being enriched by a development of national resources, became poor and discontented; while his persecutions decimated his subjects and sowed the seeds of future calamities.  Even the learned men who shed lustre around his throne prostituted their talents to nurse his egotism, and did but little to elevate the national character.  Neither Pascal with his intense hostility to spiritual despotism, nor Racine with the severe taste which marked the classic authors of Greece and Rome, nor Fenelon with his patriotic enthusiasm and clear perception of the moral strength of empires, dared to give full scope to his genius, but all were obliged to veil their sentiments in vague panegyrics of ancient heroes.  At the close of the seventeenth century the great intellectual lights had disappeared under the withering influences of despotism,—­as in ancient Rome under the emperors all manly independence had fled,—­and literature went through an eclipse.  That absorbing egotism which made Louis XIV. jealous of the fame of Conde and Luxembourg, or fearful of the talents of Louvois and Colbert, or suspicious of the influence of Racine and Fenelon, also led him to degrade his nobility by menial offices, and institute in his court a burdensome formality.