In old times, then, monasteries created towns; now, alas, it is towns that necessitate monasteries. We have now to plant the monastic school in the midst of the teeming emporiums of trade and vice, where thousands toil harder for a bare crust and a hard board than the monks of old toiled for the kingdom of heaven. It is not to listen to a learned or holy man that settlements are made nowadays, but to dig oil-wells or work coal and iron mines. Modern towns are made by traders, eager to be beforehand with their competitors, and the journalist and the liquor-seller are the first _citizens_ of the new town. _Quies_ is relegated to the region of romance; it is unpractical, it "does not pay"; learning itself, if it succeeds in getting a footing in the centres of commerce, partakes of the commercial spirit, and is rather to be called "cramming" than knowledge, and, as to the moral result of the contrast between the Benedictine principle of the early ages and the principle of hurry, of contention, of money-worship current in our days, let the annals of modern crime be called upon to witness.
What an apotheosis of royalty the name evokes! Versailles and Louis Quatorze. As if by the stroke of the enchanter's wand, there starts up before us a long procession of heroes and poets and statesmen and wits and fair women, a galaxy of glory and beauty revolving around one central figure as satellites round their sun. We lose sight of all the dark spots upon the disc in contemplating the blaze of brightness that emanates from it. We forget the iniquitous follies of the Grand Monarque, and remember nothing but the splendors of his reign, its unparalleled monarchical triumph; we see him through a mist of proud achievements in war and peace, excellence in every branch of science and industry, fine arts and letters, all that dazzled his contemporaries still dazzles us, and even at this distance his faults and follies are, if not quite eclipsed, softened and modified in the daze of a fictitious light. The group of illustrious men who surround his throne magnify rather than diminish the individuality of the man, lending a false halo to him, as if their genius were a thing of his creation, an effect rather than a cause of his ascendency. How far, in truth, Louis may have tended to create by his personal influence, his kindly patronage and keen discrimination, that wonderful assemblage of talent in every grade which will remain for ever associated with his name, it would be difficult to determine, but, judging from the extraordinary influx of genius which signalized his reign, and the corresponding dearth of it in the succeeding ones, we are tempted to believe that he at least possessed in an almost supernatural degree the gift, so precious to a king, of divining genius wherever it did exist, and of calling it forth from its hiding-places, however dismal or remote, to the light of success and fame. But for the discriminating admiration of Louis, which fanned the poetic fire of the timid and sensitive Racine and stimulated the wit of the obscure and humble Molière, we should assuredly have missed some of the noblest efforts of both those poets. Louis was prodigal of his smiles to rising talent, for he knew that to it the sunshine of encouragement is as beneficent as the sun's warmth to the earth in spring-time.