ate, the passages of the opera
prologues that were fullest of his praises.

He was drowned in vanity; and so deeply, that at his public suppers--all
the Court present, musicians also--he would hum these self-same praises
between his teeth, when the music they were set to was played!

And yet, it must be admitted, he might have done better. Though his
intellect, as I have said, was beneath mediocrity, it was capable of
being formed. He loved glory, was fond of order and regularity; was by
disposition prudent, moderate, discreet, master of his movements and his
tongue. Will it be believed? He was also by disposition good and just!
God had sufficiently gifted him to enable him to be a good King; perhaps
even a, tolerably great King! All the evil came to him from elsewhere.
His early education was so neglected that nobody dared approach his
apartment. He has often been heard to speak of those times with
bitterness, and even to relate that, one evening he was found in the
basin of the Palais Royal garden fountain, into which he had fallen! He
was scarcely taught how to read or write, and remained so ignorant, that
the most familiar historical and other facts were utterly unknown to him!
He fell, accordingly, and sometimes even in public, into the grossest
absurdities.

It was his vanity, his desire for glory, that led him, soon after the
death of the King of Spain, to make that event the pretext for war; in
spite of the renunciations so recently made, so carefully stipulated, in
the marriage contract. He marched into Flanders; his conquests there
were rapid; the passage of the Rhine was admirable; the triple alliance
of England, Sweden, and Holland only animated him. In the midst of
winter he took Franche-Comte, by restoring which at the peace of Aix-la-
Chapelle, he preserved his conquests in Flanders. All was flourishing
then in the state. Riches everywhere. Colbert had placed the finances,
the navy, commerce, manufactures, letters even, upon the highest point;
and this age, like that of Augustus, produced in abundance illustrious
men of all kinds,-even those illustrious only in pleasures.

Le Tellier and Louvois, his son, who had the war department, trembled at
the success and at the credit of Colbert, and had no difficulty in
putting into the head of the King a new war, the success of which caused
such fear to all Europe that France never recovered from it, and after
having been upon the point of succumbin