have drawn attention to a great number of them still
remaining unpublished in various archives. As for the large collection
of legislative enactments known by the name of _Etailissements de Saint
Louis,_ it is probably a lawyer's work, posterior, in great part at
least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory
enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of
law of St. Louis's date and collected by his order, although the
paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and
as if it had been dictated by him.

Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise
got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the _Recueil des Ordonnances
des Rois de France,_ as having originated with St. Louis. Its object is,
first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules,
internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict "the
exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may
hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the
which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take
place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable
necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the
Church of our kingdom." The authenticity of this act, vigorously
maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his _Defense de la
Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682,_ chap. ix. t. xliii. p. 26),
and in our time by M. Daunou (in the _Histoire litteraire de la France,
continuee par des Hembres de l'Institut,_ t. xvi. p. 75, and t. xix.
p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons,
which M. Felix Faure, in his _Histoire de Saint Louis_ (t. ii. p. 271),
has summed up with great clearness. There is no design of entering here
upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a
bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic
Sanction, as St. Louis's, is questionable, the act has, at bottom,
nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in
conformity with, the general conduct of that prince. He was profoundly
respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the
same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown
in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual.
Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve d