imself
that the gods have intrusted him with royalty. He is exalted above
individuals, only that he may be the servant of the people. To the
public he owes all his time, all his attention, and all his love;
he deserves dignity only in proportion as he gives up private
enjoyments for the public good.

Pretty sound doctrine, the foregoing, on the subject of the duties
devolving on a king. The "paternal" idea, to be sure, of government is
in it; but there is the idea, too, of limited or constitutional
monarchy. The spirit of just and liberal political thought had, it
seems, not been wholly extinguished, even at the court, by that
oppression of mind--an oppression seldom, if ever, in human history
exceeded--which was enforced under the unmitigated absolutism of Louis
XIV. The literature that, with Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the
Encyclopaedists, prepared the Revolution, had already begun virtually to
be written when Fenelon wrote his "Telemachus." It is easy to see why
the fame of Fenelon should by exception have been dear even to the
hottest infidel haters of that ecclesiastical hierarchy to which the
archbishop of Cambray himself belonged. This lover of liberty, this
gentle rebuker of kings, was of the free-thinkers, at least in the
sympathy of political thought. Nay, the Revolution itself is foreshown
in a remarkable glimpse of conjectural prophecy which occurs in the
"Telemachus." Idomeneus is a headstrong king, whom Mentor is made by the
author to reprove and instruct, for the Duke of Burgundy's benefit. To
Idomeneus--a character taken, and not unplausibly taken, to have been
suggested to Fenelon by the example of Louis XIV.--to this imaginary
counterpart of the reigning monarch of France, Mentor holds the
following language. How could the sequel of Bourbon despotism in
France--a sequel suspended now for a time, but two or three generations
later to be dreadfully visited on the heirs of Louis XIV.--have been
more truly foreshadowed? The "Telemachus:"--

Remember, that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least
powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed,
the sole proprietor of whatever his state contains; but, for that
reason, his state contains nothing of value: the fields are
uncultivated, and almost a desert; the towns lose some of their few
inhabitants every day; and trade every day declines. The king, who
must cease t