I40 HISTOR V OF FRANCE. [nHAP. cardinals' government, vvhkh was to look on France as the greatest country in the world, and on everything in it as intended to serve for the glory of the crown. But his success was greater than theirs. For Richelieu had to work for a dull invaUd, and Maza-rin for a child, while Lewis XIV. had to work for himself, and believed in him- self with the fullest faith. Not only did he reap the re- sults of their labours, but his natural dignity and courtesy, pervaded by the most intense self-assertion, made him be looked on by all ranks during his long reign rather as a demigod than as a king. Princes of the blood, nobles, and all, thought of him as the fountain of honour, and were ready to hang on him in contented dependence. Offices about the court were infinitely multiplied as excuses for retaining them there and pensioning them. The taxes still were frightfully heavy ; but under the good manage- ment of the controller-general Colbert they were for the time more endurable. This faith in himself was the chief lesson with which Lewis began life. He had been very ill-educated, more from the ignorance and narrowness of his mother and Mazarin than from design, and this per- haps helped to puff him up with the notion of his own greatness, and prevented him from seeing that he had any duties except to himself. He professed a stately and formal kind of religion, but he gave great scandal by his personal vices, and especially by an attempt to Tive his illegitimate children the position of legitimate nembers of the royal family. By this time the world had come to look on the king's morals as something out of all common rule, and other princes, dazzled by the splendour of Lewis's court, greatly damaged themselves and their countries by imitating both his tyranny and his immorality. This was a time when France was full of great men. Colbert, who was at the head of the finances, contrived by good management to make the royal revenue much larger, while the weight of taxation was less felt, and at the same time opened new branches of industry, Cherbourg glass, Abbeville cloth, Gobelins tapestry, Lyons silk, and he did his best to pro- mote colonization and to create a navy. Louvois was minister at war, and Sebastian Vauban, an engineer, was a master of the science of regular fortifications. It was also an Augustan age of literature, made memorable by the sermons of Bossuet, the devotional works of Fenelou^ the cynical maxims of La Rochefoucauld, the memoirs of
