dramatic poet. Their chief director, the Abbot of St. Cyran, was
however, a pupil of Jansen, a Dutch ecclesiastic, whose views on
abstruse questions of grace were condemned by the Jesuits; and as the
Port-Royalists would not disown the doctrines attributed to him, they
were discouraged and persecuted throughout Louis's reign, more because
he was jealous of what would not bend to his will than for any real want
of conformity. Pascal's famous "Provincial Letters" were put forth
during this controversy; and in fact, the literature of France reached
its Augustan age during this reign, and the language acquired its
standard perfection.


7. War in the Low Countries.--Maria Theresa, the queen of Louis XIV.,
was the child of the first marriage of Philip IV. of Spain; and on her
father's death in 1661, Louis, on pretext of an old law in Brabant,
which gave the daughters of a first marriage the preference over the
sons of a second, claimed the Low Countries from the young Charles II.
of Spain. He thus began a war which was really a continuance of the old
struggle between France and Burgundy, and of the endeavour of France to
stretch her frontier to the Rhine. At first England, Holland, and Sweden
united against him, and obliged him to make the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
in 1668; but he then succeeded in bribing Charles II. of England to
forsake the cause of the Dutch, and the war was renewed in 1672.
William, Prince of Orange, Louis's most determined enemy through life,
kept up the spirits of the Dutch, and they obtained aid from Germany and
Spain, through a six years' terrible war, in which the great Turenne was
killed at Saltzbach, in Germany. At last, from exhaustion, all parties
were compelled to conclude the peace of Nimeguen in 1678. Taking
advantage of undefined terms in this treaty, Louis seized various cities
belonging to German princes, and likewise the free imperial city of