He left to his infant successor a famished and miserable people, a beaten and humbled army, provinces turned into deserts by misgovernment and persecution, factions dividing the court, a schism raging in the church, an immense debt, an empty treasury, immeasurable palaces, an innumerable household, inestimable jewels and furniture.  All the sap and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated and unwholesome excrescence.  The nation was withered.  The court was morbidly flourishing.  Yet it does not appear that the associations which attached the people to the monarchy, had lost strength during his reign.  He had neglected or sacrificed their dearest interests; but he had struck their imaginations.  The very things which ought to have made him most unpopular,—­the prodigies of luxury and magnificence with which his person was surrounded, while, beyond the enclosure of his parks, nothing was to be seen but starvation and despair,—­seemed to increase the respectful attachment which his subjects felt for him.—­Edinburgh Rev. (just published.)

* * * * *

THE GRAND SECRET OF SUCCESS IN LIFE.

For all men doubtless obstructions abound; spiritual growth must be hampered and stunted, and has to struggle through with difficulty, if it do not wholly stop.  We may grant too that, for a mediocre character, the continual training and tutoring, from language-masters, dancing-masters, posture-masters of all sorts, hired and volunteer, which a high rank in any time and country assures, there will be produced a certain superiority, or at worst, air of superiority, over the corresponding mediocre character of low rank; thus we perceive, the vulgar Do-nothing, as contrasted with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man; with a wider perhaps clearer outlook into the distance; in innumerable superficial matters, however it may be when we go deeper, he has a manifest advantage.  But with the man of uncommon character, again, in whom a germ of irrepressible Force has been implanted, and will unfold itself into some sort of freedom,—­altogether the reverse may hold.  For such germs, too, there is, undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst.  True also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given.  Yet often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared.  We find accordingly that few Fredericks or Napoleons, indeed none since the Great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation; mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction.