had rendered France great service, but in a manner void of frankness, dignity, or lustre; he had made the contemporary generation pay dearly for it by reason of the spectacle he presented of trickery, perfidy, and vindictive cruelty, and by his arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of kingly power.

People are not content to have useful service; they must admire or love; and Louis XI.

inspired France with neither of those sentiments.

He has had the good fortune to be described and appraised, in his own day too, by the most distinguished and independent of his councillors, Philip de Commynes, and, three centuries afterwards, by one of the most thoughtful and the soundest intellects amongst the philosophers of the eighteenth century, Duclos, who, moreover, had the advantage of being historiographer of France, and of having studied the history of that reign in authentic documents.

We reproduce here the two judgments, the agreement of which is remarkable:-- "God," says Commynes, "had created our king more wise, liberal, and full of manly virtue than the princes who reigned with him and in his day, and who were his enemies and neighbors.