but we can and we ought to comprehend such sentiments in
an age when men not only had profound faith in the facts recorded in the
Gospels, but could not believe themselves to be looking upon the smallest
tangible relic of those facts without experiencing an emotion and a
reverence as profound as their faith. It is to such sentiments that we
owe one of the most perfect and most charming monuments of the middle
ages, _the Holy Chapel,_ which St. Louis had built between 1245 and 1248
in order to deposit there the precious relics he had collected. The
king's piety had full justice and honor done it by the genius of the
architect, Peter de llontreuil, who, no doubt, also shared his faith.

It was after the purchase of the crown of thorns and the building of _the
Holy Chapel_ that Louis, accomplishing at last the desire of his soul,
departed on his first crusade. We have already gone over the
circumstances connected with his determination, his departure, and his
life in the East, during the six years of pious adventure and glorious
disaster he passed there. We have already seen what an impression of
admiration and respect was produced throughout his kingdom when he was
noticed to have brought back with him from the Holy Land "a fashion of
living and doing superior to his former behavior, although in his youth
he had always been good and innocent and worthy of high esteem." These
expressions of his confessor are fully borne out by the deeds and laws,
the administration at home and the relations abroad, by the whole
government, in fact, of St. Louis during the last fifteen years of his
reign. The idea which was invariably conspicuous and constantly
maintained during his reign was not that of a premeditated and ambitious
policy, ever tending towards an interested object which is pursued with
more or less reasonableness and success, and always with a large amount
of trickery and violence on the part of the prince, of unrighteousness in
his deeds, and of suffering on the part of the people. Philip Augustus,
the grandfather, and Philip the Handsome, the grandson, of St. Louis, the
former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and
disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to
extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their
neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their
age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyr