placed in them, or doubted his sincerity.
Whether they were sincere or assumed, the superstitions of Louis XI.

did not prevent him from appreciating and promoting the progress of civilization, towards which the fifteenth century saw the first real general impulse.

He favored the free development of industry and trade; he protected printing, in its infancy, and scientific studies, especially the study of medicine; by his authorization, it is said, the operation for the stone was tried, for the first time in France, upon a criminal under sentence of death, who recovered, and was pardoned; and he welcomed the philological scholars who were at this time laboring to diffuse through Western Europe the works of Greek and Roman antiquity.

He instituted, at first for his own and before long for the public service, post-horses and the letter-post within his kingdom.

Towards intellectual and social movement he had not the mistrust and antipathy of an old, one-grooved, worn-out, unproductive despotism; his kingly despotism was new, and, one might almost say, innovational, for it sprang and was growing up from the ruins of feudal rights and liberties which had inevitably ended in monarchy.