ther than amended, by the gross and debasing
superstition which he constantly practised. The devotion to the heavenly
saints, of which he made such a parade, was upon the miserable principle
of some petty deputy in office, who endeavours to hide or atone for the
malversations of which he is conscious by liberal gifts to those whose
duty it is to observe his conduct, and endeavours to support a system of
fraud by an attempt to corrupt the incorruptible. In no other light can
we regard his creating the Virgin Mary a countess and colonel of his
guards, or the cunning that admitted to one or two peculiar forms of
oath the force of a binding obligation which he denied to all other,
strictly preserving the secret, which mode of swearing he really
accounted obligatory, as one of the most valuable of state mysteries.

To a total want of scruple, or, it would appear, of any sense whatever
of moral obligation, Louis XI added great natural firmness and sagacity
of character, with a system of policy so highly refined, considering the
times he lived in, that he sometimes overreached himself by giving way
to its dictates.

Probably there is no portrait so dark as to be without its softer
shades. He understood the interests of France, and faithfully pursued
them so long as he could identify them with his own. He carried the
country safe through the dangerous crisis of the war termed "for the
public good;" in thus disuniting and dispersing this grand and dangerous
alliance of the great crown vassals of France against the Sovereign, a
king of a less cautious and temporizing character, and of a more bold
and less crafty disposition than Louis XI, would, in all probability,
have failed. Louis had also some personal accomplishments not
inconsistent with his public character. He was cheerful and witty in
society; and none was better able to sustain and extol the superiority
of the coarse and selfish reasons by which he endeavoured to supply
those nobler motives for exertion which his predecessors had derived
from the high spirit of chivalry.

In fact, that system was now becoming ancient, and had, even while
in its perfection, something so overstrained and fantastic in its
principles, as rendered it peculiarly the object of ridicule, whenever,
like other old fashions, it began to fall out of repute; and the weapons
of raillery could be employed against it, without exciting the disgust
and horror with which they would have been rejected at