cause he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve by it the good
which it would have done if applied earlier. His comprehension was
always a train or two behindhand. If a national toe required amputating,
he could not see that it needed anything more than poulticing; when
others saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first
perceived that the toe needed cutting off--so he cut it off; and he
severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the disease had reached
the thigh. He was good, and honest, and well meaning, in the matter of
chasing national diseases, but he never could overtake one. As a private
man, he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was strictly
contemptible.

His was a most unroyal career, but the most pitiable spectacle in it was
his sentimental treachery to his Swiss guard on that memorable 10th of
August, when he allowed those heroes to be massacred in his cause, and
forbade them to shed the "sacred French blood" purporting to be flowing
in the veins of the red-capped mob of miscreants that was raging around
the palace. He meant to be kingly, but he was only the female saint once
more. Some of his biographers think that upon this occasion the spirit
of Saint Louis had descended upon him. It must have found pretty cramped
quarters. If Napoleon the First had stood in the shoes of Louis XVI that
day, instead of being merely a casual and unknown looker-on, there would
be no Lion of Lucerne, now, but there would be a well-stocked Communist
graveyard in Paris which would answer just as well to remember the 10th
of August by.

Martyrdom made a saint of Mary Queen of Scots three hundred years ago,
and she has hardly lost all of her saintship yet. Martyrdom made a saint
of the trivial and foolish Marie Antoinette, and her biographers
still keep her fragrant with the odor of sanctity to this day, while
unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write that the only
calamitous instinct which her husband lacked, she supplied--the instinct
to root out and get rid of an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever
she found him. The hideous but beneficent French Revolution would have
been deferred, or would have fallen short of completeness, or even
might not have happened at all, if Marie Antoinette had made the unwise
mistake of not being born. The world owes a great deal to the French
Revolution, and consequently to its two chief promoters, Louis the Poor
in Spirit and his queen.