praises and flattery of his earlier years reached him now only from the
lips of a few determined courtiers. His people hated him, and in 1715
celebrated his death as a release. Frenchmen high and low had begun the
career which ended in their terrific Revolution. Lying on his dreary
death-bed, the Grand Monarch apologized that he should "take so long in
dying." Perhaps he, also, felt that he delayed the coming of the new age.
What his career had done was to spread over all Europe a new culture and
refinement, to rouse a new splendor and recklessness among the upper
classes, and to widen almost irretrievably the gap between rich and poor,
between kings and commons. In the very years that parliamentary government
was becoming supreme in England, absolutism established itself upon the
Continent.


CHANGES IN NORTHERN EUROPE

Toward the close of this age the balance of power in Northern Europe
shifted quite as markedly as it had farther south. Three of the German
electoral princes became kings. The Elector of Saxony was chosen King of
Poland, thereby adding greatly to his power. George, Elector of Hanover,
became King of England on the death of Queen Anne. And the Elector of
Brandenburg, son of the Great Elector, when the war of 1701 against France
and Spain broke out, only lent his aid to the European coalition on
condition that the German Emperor should authorize him also to assume the
title of king, not of Brandenburg but of his other and smaller domain of
Prussia, which lay outside the empire. Most of the European sovereigns
smiled at this empty change of title without a change of dominions; but
Brandenburg or Prussia was thus made more united, more consolidated, and
it soon rose to be the leader of Northern Germany. A new family, the
Hohenzollerns, contested European supremacy with the Hapsburgs and the