pounds of ignorance, superstition, and party
zeal. So that a general notion of what is rather supposed, than really
known to be, the history of the five or six following centuries, seems to
be sufficient; and much time would be but ill employed in a minute
attention to those legends. But reserve your utmost care, and most
diligent inquiries, from the fifteenth century, and downward. Then
learning began to revive, and credible histories to be written; Europe
began to take the form, which, to some degree, it still retains: at least
the foundations of the present great powers of Europe were then laid.
Lewis the Eleventh made France, in truth, a monarchy, or, as he used to
say himself, 'la mit hors de Page'. Before his time, there were
independent provinces in France, as the Duchy of Brittany, etc., whose
princes tore it to pieces, and kept it in constant domestic confusion.
Lewis the Eleventh reduced all these petty states, by fraud, force, or
marriage; for he scrupled no means to obtain his ends.

About that time, Ferdinand King of Aragon, and Isabella his wife, Queen
of Castile, united the whole Spanish monarchy, and drove the Moors out of
Spain, who had till then kept position of Granada. About that time, too,
the house of Austria laid the great foundations of its subsequent power;
first, by the marriage of Maximilian with the heiress of Burgundy; and
then, by the marriage of his son Philip, Archduke of Austria, with Jane,
the daughter of Isabella, Queen of Spain, and heiress of that whole
kingdom, and of the West Indies. By the first of these marriages, the
house of Austria acquired the seventeen provinces, and by the latter,
Spain and America; all which centered in the person of Charles the Fifth,
son of the above-mentioned Archduke Philip, the son of Maximilian. It was
upon account of these two marriages, that the following Latin distich was
made:

Bella gerant alii, Tu felix Austria nube;
Nam qua, Mars aliis; dat tibi regna Venus.

This immense power, which the Emperor Charles the Fifth found himself
possessed of, gave him a desire for universal power (for people never
desire all till they have gotten a great deal), and alarmed France; this
sowed the seeds of that jealousy and enmity, which have flourished ever
since between those two great powers. Afterward the House of Austria was
weakened by the division made by Charles the Fifth of his dominions,
between his son, Philip the Second of Spain, and