history is the history of its greatest men. Interesting as may be the traits and sayings that shed light on the character of a single person, it is,' he says, 'a hundred times more interesting to study the progress of a nation.'1 As one who hoped to reform the world by Institutions, the author of Télémaque would give a special eye to the circumstances of their origin and growth; as a child of his century, he could not see and herein lies his difference from the truly modern historian-that Institutions are not everything, that they are no more than the lawful offspring of Ideas, and that the truest history is the history of these same Ideas, scattered abroad, as germinating seed, in the diffusive conscience of a people.

1 1 p. 640.

CHAPTER XIV

BURGUNDY AND POLITICAL REFORM

Nisi Dominus ædificaverit domum, invanum laboraverunt qui ædificant eam.— Ps. cxxvi.

IT

T is a thankless task to follow Fénelon back from discussions on the art of writing history to his dreary connexion with history in the making, to the elaborate schemes, worked out so carefully with Chevreuse and Beauvilliers, which were to prepare his old pupil, the Duke of Burgundy, for a kingship that never came. Begun so soon as the first blush of his Court disgrace was over, this political correspondence widened a little with every year, as Fénelon's influence gradually increased, and culminated in 1711 and 1712, during the few months that Burgundy was heir-apparent to the throne.

It was a gloomy period, overshadowed by the last and gloomiest of Louis' wars, the War of the Spanish Succession, undertaken in the hope of performing the impossible, of gaining the whole of that vast and heterogeneous empire for Louis' grandson, Burgundy's next brother, the Duke of Anjou. Against him was arrayed a Grand Alliance of all the Powers who dreaded the time when the Pyrenees might no longer be the Empire, ready with its rival candidate, the Arch-Duke Charles, Prussia and most of the German States, together with the two great maritime enemies of France, Holland and our own country, furious with Louis for having recognised the Old Pretender as King of England, on the death of James II. (Sept. 1701).

Even if the French King's hands had been cleaner, and he had restored by a strict observance of treaties "that belief in his honour, which it was so important to re

establish," ,"1 the War of Succession would have been a crime, for France was exhausted by her former wars, and Spain, from the first, was utterly helpless, "a mere dead-weight, a corpse, able to do nothing for herself, and sure to crush the men who tried to lift her." 2 And Louis, at the very height of his power, borne up by a long succession of victories, could ill have endured the strain of a war, whose theatre shifted from Calabria to Ghent, from Gibraltar to the Danube, and required, in the one year 1708, no less than eight of his armies in the field.

But now, except in Spain itself, where the battles of Almanza (1707) and Villa Viciosa (1710) secured the peninsula for Philip of Anjou, the tide of fortune, under Marlborough and Prince Eugene, was flowing steadily against the French. Blenheim (1704) taught

Louis

that no man might call himself great or happy before his death; Ramillies (1706) lost Spain her possessions in the Netherlands, Turin (1707) the Milanese; in the next year her Neapolitan kingdom fell without a struggle, and Louis was driven to sue for peace. But peace was refused, and in 1708, the old King, girding himself up for a mighty effort, despatched the Duke of Burgundy to command the army in Flanders.

With the appearance of his old pupil in the field, Fénelon's more personal interest in the war began. He had always been anxious that the Prince should serve, and Burgundy had already gone through the insignificant campaigns of 1702 and 1703 with some small credit to his name and great advantage to his character. But between 1703 and 1708 matters had altered immeasurably for the worse; then France still could boast that for more than half a century she had not known what it was to be defeated; now her forces were utterly demoralized, and the army of Flanders worst of all. There, says St Simon, there was, at best, no question of victories, only of orderly retirement to the frontier; the troops were ill

1 Fén. Wks., vii. p. 150.

• Ibid. p. 149.