litical acts, and the ill-will of the
extreme Church party in consequence of his liberal tendencies, it may
easily be believed that his real character is but little known, and is
in many cases deliberately falsified. A brief review of the facts and
circumstances of his reign may serve to correct, in some degree, the
false impressions which have so long prevailed.

In 1864, in the midst of the confusion of the Schleswig-Holstein war,
which was then agitating all Germany, King Max died, and his eldest
son, Ludwig, only nineteen years old, was summoned from the quiet
routine of his university studies to ascend the throne of Bavaria. In
childhood his health had been extremely delicate, and on that account
he had been educated in unusual privacy--training which, joined to
his naturally reserved and meditative disposition, and the various
disenchantments of his public career, may satisfactorily account for
his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was
so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind
filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress,
and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the
profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments
of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate
predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the
picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and
convents and brotherhoods of wandering friars, and Maximilian, though
naturally tolerant, and still more liberalized by the influence of his
Protestant queen, was a firm believer in the divine right of kings;
and having joined hands with the clerical party in putting down the
revolution of 1848, found himself afterward so far compromised in
their behalf that he was unable to oppose their aggrandizing plans; so
that in his reign the priests, and especially the Jesuits, attained to
a greater degree of power than they had ever before known.

The young king for a while carried on the government after his
father's policy, and with the same ministerial officers; but he
soon began to show signs of independence of character, the first
manifestation of which was an attempt to curtail the power of the
Jesuits, especially in the matter of public instruction. This was,
of course, enough to rouse the enmity of the whole Society of Jesus
against him, and its members have been busy ever since in thwarting
all his plans a