homage to the virtue called courage;
filling their history-books with tales about it, and nothing but it.

Let them disguise the place, however, as they will, and plaster the
walls with bad pictures as they please, it will be hard to think of any
family but one, as one traverses this vast gloomy edifice. It has not
been humbled to the ground, as a certain palace of Babel was of yore;
but it is a monument of fallen pride, not less awful, and would afford
matter for a whole library of sermons. The cheap defence of nations
expended a thousand millions in the erection of this magnificent
dwelling-place. Armies were employed, in the intervals of their warlike
labors, to level hills, or pile them up; to turn rivers, and to build
aqueducts, and transplant woods, and construct smooth terraces, and long
canals. A vast garden grew up in a wilderness, and a stupendous palace
in the garden, and a stately city round the palace: the city was peopled
with parasites, who daily came to do worship before the creator of these
wonders--the Great King. "Dieu seul est grand," said courtly Massillon;
but next to him, as the prelate thought, was certainly Louis,
his vicegerent here upon earth--God's lieutenant-governor of the
world,--before whom courtiers used to fall on their knees, and shade
their eyes, as if the light of his countenance, like the sun, which
shone supreme in heaven, the type of him, was too dazzling to bear.

Did ever the sun shine upon such a king before, in such a palace?--or,
rather, did such a king ever shine upon the sun? When Majesty came out
of his chamber, in the midst of his superhuman splendors, viz, in his
cinnamon-colored coat, embroidered with diamonds; his pyramid of a wig,*
his red-heeled shoes, that lifted him four inches from the ground, "that
he scarcely seemed to touch;" when he came out, blazing upon the dukes
and duchesses that waited his rising,--what could the latter do, but
cover their eyes, and wink, and tremble? And did he not himself believe,
as he stood there, on his high heels, under his ambrosial periwig, that
there was something in him more than man--something above Fate?

* It is fine to think that, in the days of his youth, his
Majesty Louis XIV. used to POWDER HIS WIG WITH GOLD-DUST.

This, doubtless, was he fain to believe; and if, on very fine days, from
his terrace before his gloomy palace of Saint Germains, he could catch
a glimpse, in the distance, of a certain white spire o