his parliament. Lewis at first affected to receive these propositions
coolly, and at length agreed to them with the air of a man who is
conferring a great favour: but in truth, the course which he had
resolved to take was one by which he might gain and could not lose.

It seems certain that he never seriously thought of establishing
despotism and Popery in England by force of arms. He must have been
aware that such an enterprise would be in the highest degree arduous and
hazardous, that it would task to the utmost all the energies of France
during many years, and that it would be altogether incompatible with
more promising schemes of aggrandisement, which were dear to his heart.
He would indeed willingly have acquired the merit and the glory of doing
a great service on reasonable terms to the Church of which he was a
member. But he was little disposed to imitate his ancestors who, in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had led the flower of French chivalry
to die in Syria and Egypt: and he well knew that a crusade against
Protestantism in Great Britain would not be less perilous than the
expeditions in which the armies of Lewis the Seventh and of Lewis the
Ninth had perished. He had no motive for wishing the Stuarts to be
absolute. He did not regard the English constitution with feelings at
all resembling those which have in later times induced princes to make
war on the free institutions of neighbouring nations. At present a
great party zealous for popular government has ramifications in every
civilised country. And important advantage gained anywhere by that party
is almost certain to be the signal for general commotion. It is not
wonderful that governments threatened by a common danger should combine
for the purpose of mutual insurance. But in the seventeenth century no
such danger existed. Between the public mind of England and the public
mind of France, there was a great gulph. Our institutions and our
factions were as little understood at Paris as at Constantinople. It may
be doubted whether any one of the forty members of the French Academy
had an English volume in his library, or knew Shakespeare, Jonson, or
Spenser, even by name. A few Huguenots, who had inherited the mutinous
spirit of their ancestors, might perhaps have a fellow feeling with
their brethren in the faith, the English Roundheads: but the Huguenots
had ceased to be formidable. The French, as a people, attached to the
Church of Rome, and proud