Not one of these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament.

(_Histoire de Saint Louis,_ by M.Felix Faure, t.ii.

pp.

120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville's often-quoted account of St.Louis's familiar intervention in his subjects' disputes about matters of private interest.

"Many a time," says he, "it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him.