CHAPTER XXVI.

Observations on the age of Louis XIV. and on Voltaire.

If in the present work we frequently cite Louis XIV. it is because on such an occasion his idea naturally presents itself. His reign was so long; his character so prominent; his qualities so ostensible; his affairs were so interwoven with those of the other countries of Europe, and especially with those of England; the period in which he lived produced such a revolution in manners; and, above all, his encomiastic historian, Voltaire, has decorated both the period and the king with so much that is great and brilliant, that they fill a large space in the eye of the reader. Voltaire writes as if the age of Louis XIV. bounded the circle of human glory; as if the antecedent history of Europe were among those inconsiderable and obscure annals, which are either lost in fiction, or sunk into insignificance; as if France, at the period he celebrates, bore the same relation to the modern, that Rome did to the ancient world, when she divided the globe into two portions, Romans and barbarians; as if Louis were the central sun from which all the lesser lights of the European firmament borrowed their feeble radiance.

But whatever other countries may do, England at least is able to look back with triumph to ages anterior to that which is exclusively denominated the age of Louis XIV. Nay, in that vaunted age itself, we venture to dispute with France the palm of glory. To all they boast of arms— we need produce no other proof of superiority, than that we conquered the boasters. To all that they bring in science, and it must be allowed that they bring much, or where would be the honour of eclipsing them? -we have to oppose our Locke, our Boyle, and our Newton. To their long list of wits and of poets-it would be endless, in the way of competition, to attempt enumerating, star by star, the countless constellation which illuminated the bright contemporary reign of Anne.

But the principal reason for which we so often cite the conduct, and, in citing the conduct, refer to the errors of Louis, is, that there was a time when the splendour of his character, his imposing magnificence and generosity, made us in too much danger of considering him as a model. The illusion has in a good degree vanished; yet the inexperienced reader is not only still liable, by the dazzling qualities of the king, to be blinded to his vices, but is in danger of not finding out that those very qualities were themselves little better than vices.

But it is not enough for writers, who wish to promote the best interests of the great, to expose vices; they should also consider it as part of their duty to strip off the mask from false virtues, especially those to which the highly born and the highly flattered are peculiarly liable. To those who are captivated with the shining annals of the ambitious and the magnificent; who are struck with the glories with which the brows of the bold and the prosperous are encircled; such calm, unobtrusive qualities as justice, charity, temperance, meekness and purity, will make but a mean figure; or, at best, will be considered only as the virtues of the vulgar, not as the attributes of kings. While in the portrait of the conqueror,

ambition, sensuality, oppression, luxury, and pride, painted in the least offensive colours, and blended with the bright tints of personal bravery, gaiety, and profuse liberality, will lead the sanguine and the young to doubt whether the former class of qualities can be very mischievous, which is so blended and lost in the latter; especially when they find that hardly any abatement is made by the historian for the one, while the other is held up to admiration.

There is no family in which the showy qualities have more blinded the reader, and sometimes the writer also, to their vices, than the princes of the house of Medici. The profligate Alexander, the first usurper of the dukedom of Florence, is declared, by one of his historians, Sandoval, “to be a person of excellent conduct;" and though the writer himself acknowledges his extreme licentiousness, yet he says, "he won the Florentines by his obliging manners;" those Florentines whom he not only robbed of their freedom, but dishonoured in the persons of their wives and daughters; his unbounded profligacy not even respecting the sanctity of convents! Another writer, speaking of the house of Medici collectively, says, "their having restored knowledge and elegance will, in time, obliterate their faults. Their usurpation, tyranny, pride, perfidy, vindictive cruelty, parricides, and incest, will be remembered no more. Future ages will forget their atrocious crimes in fond admiration!” * Ought historians to teach such lessons to princes? Ought they to be told that "knowledge and elegance" cannot be bought too dear, though purchased by such atrocious crimes? The illustrious house of Medici seems to have revived, in every point of resemblance, the Athenian character. With one or two honourable exceptions, it exhibits the same union of moral corruption with mental taste: the same genius for the arts, and the same neglect of the virtues; the same polish, and the same profligacy; the same passion for learning, and tlie same appetite for pleasure; the same interchange of spectacles and assassinations; the same preference of the beauty of a statue to the life of a citizen.

So false are the estimates which have ever been made of human conduct; so seldom has praise been justly bestowed in this life; so many wrong actions not only escape censure, but are accounted reputable, that it furnishes one strong argument for a future retribution. This injustice of human judgment led even the pagan Plato, in the person of Socrates, to assign, in an ingenious fiction, a reason why a judgment after death was appointed. He accounts for the necessity of this, by observing, that in a preceding period each person had been judged in his lifetime, and by living judges. The consequence was, that false judgments were continually passed. The reason of these unjust decisions, he observes, is, that men being judged in the body, the blemishes and defects of their minds are overlooked, in consideration of their beauty, their high rank, or their riches and being also surrounded by a multitude who are always ready to extol their virtues, the judges of course are biassed; and being themselves also in the body, their own minds likewise are darkened. It was therefore determined, that men should not be called to their trial till after death, when they shall appear before the judge, himself a pure ethereal spirit, stripped of that body and those ornamental appendages which had * Noble's Memoirs of the Illustrious House of Medici.

misled earthly judges.* The spirit of this fable is as applicable to the age of Louis XIV. as it was to that of Alexander, in which it was written.

Liberality is a royal virtue; a virtue too, which has its own immediate reward in the delight which accompanies its exercise. All wealth is in order to diffusion. If novelty be, as has been said, the great charm of life, there is no way of enjoying it so perfectly as by perpetual acts of beneficence. The great become insensible to the pleasure of their own affluence, from having been long used to it: but, in the distribution of riches, there is always something fresh and reviving; and the opulent add to their own stock of happiness all that their bounty bestows on others. It is pity, therefore, on the mere score of voluptuousness, that neither Vitellius nor Eliogabalus, nor any of the other imperial gourmands, was ever so fortunate as to find out this multiplied luxury of "eating with many mouths at once." Homage must satiate, intemperance will cloy, splendour will fatigue, dissipation exhaust, and adulation surfeit; but the delights of beneficence will be always new and refreshing. And there is no quality in which a prince has it more in his power to exhibit a faint resemblance of that great Being whose representative he is, than in the capacity and the love of this communicative goodness.

But, it is the perfection of the Christian virtues, that they never intrench on each other. It is a trite remark, yet a remark that requires to be repeated, that liberality loses the very name of virtue, when it is practised at the expense of justice, or even of prudence. It must be allowed, that of all the species of liberality, there is not one more truly royal than that which fosters genius and rewards letters. But the motive of the patron, and the resources from which his bounty is drawn, must determine on the merit of the action. Leo X. has been extolled by all his historians as a prodigy of generosity; a quality, indeed, which eminently distinguished his whole family; but the admiration excited by reading the numberless instances of his munificent spirit in remunerating men of talents, will receive a great drawback, by reflecting, that, he drew a large part of the resources necessary for his liberality from the scandalous sale of indulgences. This included not only selling the good works of the saints, (of which the church had always an inexhaustible chest in hand,) over and above such as were necessary to their own salvation, to any affluent sinner who was rich enough to pay for them; not only a full pardon for all sins past and present of the living offender, but for all that were to come, however great their number, or enormous their nature.t

The splendid pontiff earned an immortal fame in the grateful pages of those scholars who tasted of his bounty; while, by this operation of fraud upon folly, the credulous multitude were drained of their money, the ignorant tempted to the boldest impiety, the vicious to the most unbounded

* See Guardian, No. 27.

This munificent pope, not contented with supplying his own wants by this spiritual traffic, provided also for his relations by setting them up in the same lucrative commerce. His sister Magdalen's portion was derived from the large sphere assigned her for carrying on this merchandise; her warehouse was in Saxony. More distant relations had smaller shops in different provinces, for the sale of this popular commodity.

profligacy, and the measure of the iniquities of the church of Rome was filled up.

But Louis XIV. carried this honourable generosity to an extent unknown before. He bestowed presents and pensions on no less than sixty men of the most eminent talents and learning in different countries of Europe. One is sorry to be compelled, by truth, to detract from the splendour of such liberality, by two remarks. In the first place, it is notorious, that the bounty originated from his having learned that cardinal Richelieu had sent large presents to many learned foreigners, who had written panegyrics on him. Who can help suspecting, that the king, less patient or less prudent than the cardinal, was eager to pay beforehand for his own anticipated panegyrics? Secondly, who can help regretting that the large sums, thus liberally bestowed, had not been partly subtracted from the expense of his own boundless self-gratifications, which were at the same time carried on with a profusion without example? For Louis was contented with bringing into action a sentiment, which Nero even ventured to put into words, "that there was no other use of treasure but to squander it." Who can forget that this money had been extorted from the people by every impost and exaction which Colbert, his indefatigable minister, himself a patron of genius, could devise? How ineffectually does the historian and eulogist of the king labour to vindicate him on this very ground of profusion, from the imputed charge of avarice, by strangely asserting, that a king of France, who possesses no income distinct from the revenues of the state, and who only distributes the public money, cannot be accused of covetousness! an apology almost as bad as the imputed crime. For, where is the merit of any liberality which not only subtracts nothing from the gratification of the giver, but which is exercised at the positive expense of the public comfort ? *

Colbert has been even preferred to Sully, for his zeal in diminishing peculation and public abuses. But though Colbert was a very able minister, yet there was a wide difference between his motives of action and those of Sully, and between their application of the public money. But, even the profuseness of the extortioner Fouquet, in squandering the revenues of the state as freely as if they had been his own private property, is converted by Voltaire into a proof of the greatness of his soul, because his depredations were spent in acts of munificence and liberality; as if the best possible application of money could atone for injustice or oppression in the acquisition of it!

In how different a mould was the soul of Gustavus Adolphus cast! and how much more correct were the views of that great king as to the true grounds of liberality! As brave a warrior as Charles XII. without his brutal ferocity; as liberal as Louis, without his prodigality; as zealous a patron of letters as Henry VIII. without his vanity! He was, indeed,

*The person (Buonaparte) who now holds the reins of government in a neighbouring nation, is said successfully to have adopted similar measures. He early made it his studious care to buy up the good report of authors and men of talents, knowing mankind well enough to be assured, that this was the sure and immediate road to that fame for which he pants. Near spectators instantly detect the fallacy; but strangers, as he foresaw, would mistake the adulation of these bribed witnesses for the general opinion; the assertion of the declaimer, for the sentiment of the public. Accordingly, the sycophancy of the journalist has been represented as the voice of the people.

so warm a friend to learning, that he erected schools, and founded universities, in the very uproar of war. These he endowed, not by employing his minister to levy taxes on his distressed people; not by exhausting the resources of the state, meritorious as was the object to be established; but by converting to these noble institutions, almost all his own patrimonial lands of the house of Vasa!

Against the principles of Voltaire, it is now scarcely necessary to caution the young reader. His disgrace has become almost as signal as his offences; his crimes seem to have procured for his works their just reprobation. To enter on a particular censure of them, might be only to invite our readers to their perusal; and, indeed, a criticism on his philosophical and innumerable miscellaneous writings, pestilential as their general principle is, would be foreign from the present purpose, as there is little danger that the royal pupil should ever be brought within the sphere of their contamination. I shall therefore confine myself to a very few observations on his character of the monarch, in the work under consideration; a work which is still most likely to be read, and which, notwithstanding its faults, perhaps best deserves a perusal—his Age of Louis the Fourteenth.

In summing up the king's character, he calls his unbounded profligacy in the variety of his mistresses, and the ruinous prodigality with which they were supported, by the cool term of weakness. Voltaire again does not blush to compliment a sovereign, whose life was one long tissue of criminal attachments, with having "uniformly observed the strictest rules of decency and decorum towards his wife." His rancour against the Jansenists; his unjust ambition and arbitrary temper; his wars, which Voltaire himself allows "to have been undertaken without reason;" his cruel ravaging of the Palatinate with fire and sword, and its wretched inhabitants driven for shelter to woods and dens, and caves of the earth; his bloody persecution of the Protestants, these he calls by the gentle name of littleness; not forgetting, in the true modern spirit of moral calculation, to place in one scale his admired qualities of whatsoever class, his beauty, valour, taste, generosity, and magnificence; and to throw into the other, his crimes and vices, which being assumed to be only littlenesses and weaknesses, it is no wonder if he glories in the preponderance of his virtues in the balance.

By thus reducing a mass of mischief into almost impalpable frailties, and opposing to them with enthusiastic rapture qualities of no real solidity, he holds out a picture of royalty too alluring to the unformed judgment of young and ardent readers, to whom it ought to be explained that this tinsel is not gold, that les bienséances are not virtues, and that graces of manner are a poor substitute for integrity of heart and rectitude of conduct.

By the avowal of the same author, it was in the very lap of pleasure, when all was one unbroken scene of joy, when life was one perpetual course of festive delight, masked balls, pageants, and spectacles, that the Palatinate was twice laid in ashes, the extermination of the Protestants decreed, and the destruction of Holland planned; the latter, not by the sudden ardour of a victorious soldiery, but by a cool deliberate mandate, in a letter under the king's own hand.