ic
calamities opened his eyes to the vanity of all earthly grandeur, and
led him to enter those paths of piety where his soul found true
repose. The death of his father, cut down suddenly in the midst of
his godless revelry, and the decease of his beloved wife, Auguste
Marie Jeanne, a princess of Baden, in her twenty-second year, so
impressed him with the uncertainty of all terrestrial good, and left
his home and his heart so desolate, that he retired to the Abbey of
St. Genevieve, and devoted the remainder of his days to study, to
prayer, and to active works of Christian usefulness.

He became a proficient in the fine arts, an accomplished scholar, and
a patron of all those literary men whose works tended to benefit
society. He founded hospitals and literary institutions; established
a college at Versailles; endowed a professorship at the Sorbonne for
expounding the Hebrew text of the Scriptures, and translated, from
the original Greek and Hebrew, the Epistles of Paul and the Psalms of
David. At the early age of forty-eight he died--cheerfully fell
asleep in Jesus, rejoicing in the hope of a heavenly inheritance. Few
men who have ever lived have crowded their days with more kind,
useful, and generous actions.

His son, Louis Philippe, acquired the sobriquet of _le Gros_, or the
Fat, from his excessive corpulence. His unwieldy body probably
contributed to that indolence of mind which induced him to withdraw
from nearly all participation in political life. Louis XV. was one of
the vilest of men, and by a portion of his subjects was thoroughly
detested. Exasperated by an act of gross despotism, the deputies from
Brittany offered to furnish Louis Philippe with sixty thousand men,
completely armed, to overthrow the reigning dynasty, and to establish
in its place the House of Orleans. The prince received the deputation
courteously, but decidedly declined embarking in the enterprise,
avowing that he had not sufficient energy of character to meet its
demand, and that he was too much attached to his relative, Louis XV.,
to engage in a conspiracy against him. He was an amiable, upright
man, avoiding notoriety, and devoting himself to literary pursuits.
Being of the blood royal, the etiquette of the French court did not
allow him to enter into marriage relations with any one in whose
veins the blood of royalty did not flow. His first wife, Louise
Henriette de Bourbon Conti, was a princess of royal lineage. Upon her
death he ma