in Bossuet's style from the moment he became a courtier of Louis XIV.
The King brought men together, placed them in a position where they
were induced and urged to bring their talents to a focus. His court was
alternately a high-bred gala and a stately university. If we contrast his
life with those of his predecessor and successor, with the dreary existence
of Louis XIII and the crapulous lifelong debauch of Louis XV, we become
sensible that Louis XIV was distinguished in no common degree; and when we
further reflect that much of his home and all of his foreign policy was
precisely adapted to flatter, in its deepest self-love, the national spirit
of France, it will not be quite impossible to understand the long-continued
reverberation of his fame.

But Louis XIV's reign has better titles than the adulations of courtiers
and the eulogies of wits and poets to the attention of posterity. It marks
one of the most memorable epochs in the annals of mankind. It stretches
across history like a great mountain range, separating ancient France
from the France of modern times. On the further slope are Catholicism and
feudalism in their various stages of splendor and decay--the France of
crusade and chivalry, of St. Louis and Bayard. On the hither side are
freethought, industry, and centralization--the France of Voltaire, Turgot,
and Condorcet.

When Louis came to the throne the Thirty Years' War still wanted six years
of its end, and the heat of theological strife was at its intensest glow.
When he died the religious temperature had cooled nearly to freezing-point,
and a new vegetation of science and positive inquiry was overspreading the
world. This amounts to saying that his reign covers the greatest epoch
of mental transition through which the human mind has hitherto passed,
excepting the transition we are witnessing in the day which now is. We need
but recall the names of the writers and thinkers who arose during Louis