Louis was now seventy-four,—­an old man whose delusions were dispelled, and to whom successive misfortunes had brought grief and shame.  He was deprived by death of his son and grandson, who gave promise of rare virtues and abilities; only a feeble infant—­his great-grandson—­was the heir of the monarchy.  All his vast enterprises had failed.  He suffered, to all appearance, a righteous retribution for his early passion for military glory.  “He had invaded the rights of Holland; and Holland gave him no rest until, with the aid of the surrounding monarchies, France was driven to the verge of ruin.  He had destroyed the cities of the Palatinate; and the Rhine provinces became a wall of fire against his armies.  He had conspired against liberty in England; and it was from England that he experienced the most fatal opposition.”  His wars, from which he had expected glory, ended at last in the curtailment of his original possessions.  His palaces, which had excited the admiration of Europe, became the monuments of extravagance and folly.  His persecutions, by which he hoped to secure religious unity, sowed the seeds of discontent, anarchy, and revolution.  He left his kingdom politically weaker than it was when he took it; he entailed nothing but disasters to his heirs.  His very grants and pensions were subversive of intellectual dignity and independence.  At the close of the seventeenth century the great lights had disappeared; he survived his fame, his generals, his family, and his friends; the infirmities of age oppressed his body, and the agonies of religious fears disturbed his soul.  We see no greatness but in his magnificence; we strip him of all claims to genius, and even to enlightened statesmanship, and feel that his undoubted skill in holding the reins of government must be ascribed to the weakness and degradation of his subjects, rather than to his own strength.  But the verdicts of the last and present generation of historians, educated with hatred of irresponsible power, may be again reversed, and Louis XIV. may loom up in another age, if not as the grand monarque whom his contemporaries worshipped, yet as a man of great natural abilities who made fatal mistakes, and who, like Napoleon after him, alternately elevated and depressed the nation over which he was called to reign,—­not like Napoleon, as a usurper and a fraud, but as an honest, though proud and ambitious, sovereign, who was supposed to rule by divine right, of whom the nations of Europe were jealous, who lived in fear and hatred of his power, and who finally conspired, not to rob him of his throne and confine him to a rock, but to take from him the provinces he had seized and the glory in which he shone.

AUTHORITIES.