The History of France. By M. Guizot. Translated by Robert
Black, M.A. Volume IV. (Sampson Low and Co.)—This volume takes up the history at the death of Henry IV., and carries it on to the death of Louis XIV., a period of a little more than a hundred years. Le Grand Monarque is, of course, the great figure, and M. Guizot has . drawn it with extraordinary vivacity and power. But he has drawn it from a point of view which an Englishman could hardly take up. To us there is a great deal of hollowness and sham about the great King. When we think of him, we always think of the grand peruke without which no eye ever saw him. We have no indulgence for the miserable compromise which he tried to make between his pleasures and his religion. But the splendour of the figure imposes on M. Guizot. And indeed, austere as the historian was, he had facility for being imposed upon by royal splendours. Very likely Louis was really greater than he ever can seem to its,and M. Guizot does him better justice, because he suffers just a little from the illusions from which we are wholly free. Nothing certainly could
be more moderate than the language which he uses about the great King's vices and crimes. We might even say that the story of Louis's profligacy, if it has to be "related for the rising generation," should have been more sternly told. The La Valliere, for instance, eager to be a harlot as long as she could please, and becoming religious only when definitely supplanted, is a personage for whom it is immoral to express sympathy. We may praise, on the other hand, the temperance with which M. Gnizst deals with the persecutions with which Louis sought to atone for his sins. The Huguenot historian is even lenient to the ecclesiastics, whose eloquence found but the mildest censure for the king's adulteries_ We need hardly say that the volume is one of unusual interest, and that Mr. Black presents it in vigorous English.
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