s, its parks and marble halls, did the modern Nebuchadnezzar
revel in a pomp and grandeur unparalleled in the history of Europe,
surrounded by eminent prelates, poets, philosophers, and statesmen,
and all that rank and beauty had ennobled throughout his vast
dominions. Intoxicated by their united flatteries, by all the incense
which sycophancy, carried to a science, could burn before him, he
almost fancied himself a deity, and gave no bounds to his
self-indulgence, his vanity, and his pride. Every thing was
subordinate to his pleasure and his egotism--an egotism alike
regardless of the tears of discarded favorites, and the groans of his
overburdened subjects.

[Sidenote: His Military Ambition.]

But Louis, at last, palled with pleasure, was aroused from the
festivities of Versailles by dreams of military ambition. He knew
nothing of war, of its dangers, its reverses, or of its ruinous
expenses; but he fancied it would be a beautiful sport for a wealthy
and absolute monarch to engage in the costly game. He cast his eyes on
Holland, a state extremely weak in land forces, and resolved to add it
to the great kingdom over which he ruled.

The only power capable of rendering effectual assistance to Holland,
when menaced by Louis XIV., was England; but England was ruled by
Charles II., and all he cared for were his pleasures and independence
from parliamentary control. The French king easily induced him to
break his alliance with the Dutch by a timely bribe, while, at the
same time, he insured the neutrality of Spain, by inflaming the
hereditary prejudices of the Spanish court against the Low Countries.

War, therefore, without even a decent pretence, and without
provocation, was declared against Holland, with a view of annexing the
Low Countries to France.

Before the Dutch were able to prepare for resistance, Louis XIV.
appeared on the banks of the Rhine with an army of one hundred and
twenty thousand, marshalled by such able generals as Luxembourg,
Conde, and Turenne. The king commanded in person, and with all the
pomp of an ancient Persian monarch, surrounded with women and nobles.
Without any adequate force to resist him, his march could not but be
triumphant. He crossed the Rhine,--an exploit much celebrated, by his
flatterers, though nothing at all extraordinary,--and, in the course
of a few weeks, nearly all the United Provinces had surrendered to the
royal victor. The reduction of Holland and Zealand alone was n