other powers, that had armed to defend and guarantee her indepe dence, all lost something."

13. The years which followed the peace of Nimeguen were the most prosperous for France; and formed the zenith of the reign of Louis XIV. All Europe had been armed against him, and success had more or less crowned all his enterprises. He assumed to himself the title of Great; and one of his dukes even kept a burning lamp before the statue of the monarch, as before an altar; the least insult offered by foreign courts to his representatives, or neglect of etiquette, was sure to bring down signal vengeance. In the years 1682 and 1683 Algiers was bombarded, then a new mode of warfare: in 1684 Genoa experienced the same fate because it refused to allow the French monarch to establish a depot within its territory. Even the pope was humbled before the "Grand Monarch;" some of the German princes were expelled from their territories; and in time of peace French maurauding parties devastated the Spanish provinces. Louis increased his navy to two hundred and thirty vessels; and toward the end of his reign his armies amounted to four hundred and fifty thousand men. But the greatest glories of the reign of Louis were those connected with literature and the arts. Men of letters now, for the first time, began to exert a great influence on the mind of the French nation; and the familiar names of Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Massillon, and Fénélon, adorned the age of Louis, and shed on the land the brightness of their fame. In the next century the writings of these men, and of their successors, determined the fate of the great monarchy which Louis had built

up.

14. The queen of France being dead, towards the year 1685 Louis secretly married Madame Scarron, the widow of the celebrated comic writer, on whom he conferred the title of Madame De Maintenon. This woman, who had been educated a Calvinist, and had abjured her religion, would have made all Protestants do the same; and it was chiefly through her influence, and that of the royal confessor La Chaise, that the king, naturally bigoted, became a bitter persecutor of his Protestant subjects. In 1685 he revoked the edict of Nantes, which had given tolerance to all religions, forbade all exercise of the Protestant worship, and banished from the kingdom, within fifteen days, all Protestant ecclesiastics who would not recant. Afterwards he closed the ports against the fugitives, sent to the gal boys those who attempted to escape, and confiscated their property.

France lost by these cruel measures two hundred thousand-some say five hundred thousand-of her best subjects; and the bigotry of Louis gave a greater blow to the industry and wealth of his kingdom than the unlimited expenses of his pride and ambition.

15. The cruelties of Louis to the Protestants roused the hearts of the Germans, Dutch, and English, against him, and accelerated a general war. In 1686 a league was formed at Augsburg by all the German princes to restrain the encroachments of Louis: Holland joined it, Spain also, excited by jealousy of a domineering neighbor; Sweden, Denmark, and Savoy, were afterwards gained; and the revolution of 1688, by which William of Holland ascended the throne of England, placed the latter country at the head of the confederacy. But Louis was not daunted by the power of the league anticipating his enemies, he was first in the field, sending an army against Germany in 1688, which ravaged the Palatinate' with fire and sword. He also sent an army into Flanders, one into Italy, and a third to check the Spaniards in Catalonia; while at the same time he sent a fleet and an army to Ireland, to aid James II. in recovering the throne of England.

16. After the first campaign, in which Louis profited little, he gave the command of his armies to new generals of approved talent, and instantly the fortune of the war changed. In 1690 Savoy was overrun by the French marshal Catinat, and Flanders by marshal Luxembourg: the combined squadrons of England and Holland were defeated by the French admiral Tourville, off Beachy Head;' and a descent was made on the coast of England. In 1692 the fortress of Namur' was taken by the French, in spite of all the efforts of William and the allies to relieve it; but during the progress of the siege the French were defeated in a terrible naval battle off Cape La Hogue; a battle that decided the fate of the Stuarts, and marks the era of England's dominion over the seas.

1. The Palatinate, by which is generally understood the Lower Palatinate, or Palatinate of the Rhine, was a country of Germany, on both sides of the Rhine, embracing about sixteen hundred square miles, and now divided among Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Hesse Darmstadt Nassau, &c. That part of it west of the Rhine, and belonging to Bavaria, is still called "The Palatinate." The Upper Palatinate, embracing a somewhat larger territory, was in Bavaria, and bordered on Bohemia. Amberg was its capital. (Mep No. XVII.)

2. Beachy Head is a bold promontory on the southern coast of England, eighteen miles south-west from Hastings. (Map No. XVI.)

3. Namur is a strongly-fortified town of Belgium, at the junction of the Sambre and Meuse, thirty-five miles south-east from Brussels. (Map Nɔ. XV.)

4. Cape La Hogue is a prominent headland of France, on the English Channel, sixteen miles north-west of Cherbourg. (Map No. XIII)

17. The campaign of 1693 was fortunate for the French, who gained the bloody battle of Nerwinden' over king William-defeated the duke of Savoy in a general action at Marseilles-made progress against the Spaniards in Catalonia-and gained some advantages at sea. But after this year Louis no longer visited his armies in person; and succeeding campaigns became less fruitful of important and decisive results. France had been exhausted by the enormous exertions of her monarch, and all parties were anxious to terminate a war in which much blood had been shed, much treasure expended, and no permanent acquisitions made. Conferences for peace commenced in 1696; and in the beginning of 1697 the plenipotentiaries of the several powers assembled at Ryswick,' a small town in HolIn the treaty, which was signed in September, England gained only the recognition of the monarch of her choice; while the French king's renunciation of the Spanish succession, which had been one important object of the war, was not even mentioned. Although in the treaty Louis appeared to make concessions, yet he kept the new frontier that he had chosen in Flanders, whilst the possession of Strasburg extended the French limits to the Rhine. Louis had baffled the most powerful European league; and although the commerce of the kingdom was destroyed, and the country exhausted of men and money, while a dreadful famine was ravaging what war had spared, yet at the close of the seventeenth century France still preserved, over surrounding nations, the ascendency that Richelieu had planned, and that Louis XIV. had proudly won.

IV. COTEMPORARY HISTORY.-1. Besides France, England, Germany, and the countries connected with them in wars and alliances, the strictly universal history of this period embraces a range more extended than that of any previous century. On the continent the histories of the leading powers become more and more intermingled

1. Nerwinden is a small village of Belgium, about thirty-three miles south-east from Brussels 2. Ryswick is a small town in the west of Holland, two miles south-east from Hague, and thirty-five south-west from Amsterdam. The peace of Ryswick terminated what is known in American history as "King William's War,"---a war between the French and the English American colonies, attended with numerous inroads of the Indians, who were in alliance with the French. (Map No. XV.)

3. Strasburg is an ancient fortified city on the west bank of the Rhine, in the former province of Alsace. It is principally noted for its cathedral, said to have been originally founded by Clovis, in 504. The modern building, however, was begun in 1015, but not finished till the fifteenth century. Its spire reaches to the extraordinary height of four hundred and sixty-six feet-about seven feet higher than St. Peter's in Rome, and about five feet higher than the great pyramid of Cheops. (Maps Nos. XIII. and XVII.)

1. DENMARK, SWEEN,

AND NORWAY.

the Northern States are seen growing in importance, and beginning to take part in European politics; while, abroad, colonies are planted that are soon to assume the rank of independent and powerful nations 2. It was not until after the Reformation that the three Scandinavian States, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, came into contact with the Southern nations of Christendom, nor until the commencement of the "Thirty Years' War, ` in the early part of the seventeenth century, that they took any active part in the concerns of their southern neighbors, when, under the conduct of the heroic Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden and her allies warred so manfully in the cause of religious freedom Under Gustavus, the glory and power of Sweden attained their greatest height; and although the successes of the Swedish arms continued under Christina, Charles X., and Charles XI., Swedish history offers little further that is interesting to the general student until the accession of Charles XII. in 1697, the extraordinary events of whose career belong to the next century.

II. POLAND.

3. The history of Poland, during most of the seventeenth cen. tury, is of less interest to the general reader than that of Sweden, being filled with accounts of unimportant do mestic contentions among the nobility, and of foreign wars with Sweden, Russia, and Turkey, while the mass of the people, in the lowest state of degradation, were slaves, in the fullest extent of the term, and not supposed to have any legal existence. The greatest of the monarchs of Poland was John Sobieski, elected to the throne in 1674, the fame of whose victories over the Turks threw a transient splendor on the waning destinies of his ill-fated country. His first great achievement was the victory of Kotzim,' gained, with a comparatively small force, over an army of eighty thousand Mussulmen, strongly intrenched on the banks of the Dniester, leaving forty thou sand of the enemy dead in the precincts of the camp. (Nov. 1673.) All Europe was electrified with this extraordinary triumph, the greatest that had been won for three centuries over the infidels.

4. Other victories of the Polish hero, scarcely less important, are recorded in the annals of Poland; but what has immortalized the name of John Sobieski is the deliverance of Vienna2 in 1683. A

1. Kotzim is now an important fortress of south-western Russia, situated on the right bank of the Dulester, in the province of Bessarabia. The Turks strongly-fortified it in 1718, but it was successively taken by the Russians in 1730, 1769, and 1788. (Map No. XVII.)

2. Vienna, the capital of the Austrian empire, is on the southern bank of the Danube, three aundred and thirty miles south-east from Berlin and eight hun fred miles north-west from

revolt of the Hungarians from the dominion of Austria, and an alli. ance formed between them and the Turks, had brought an army of nearly three hundred thousand men against the Austrian capital, which was defended by its citizens, and a garrison of little more than eleven thousand men. After an active siege of more than two months, Vienna was reduced to the last extremity. In the meantime the Austrian emperor, who had left his capital to make what defence it could against the immense hosts of Turks that poured down upon it, had solicited the aid of the Polish king; and Sobieski was not long in making his appearance at the head of a small, but resolute army of eighteen thousand veterans. The combined Polish and Austrian forces, when all assembled, amounted to only seventy thousand men, whom the Turks outnumbered more than three to one; but Sobieski, whose name alone was a terror to the infidels, was at once the Agamemnon and Achilles of the Christian host.

5. Sunday the 12th of September, 1683, was the important day that was to decide whether the Turkish crescent or the cross, was to wave on the turrets of Vienna. At five o'clock in the afternoon Sobieski had drawn up his forces in the plain fronting the Mussulmen camp, and ordering the advance, he exclaimed aloud, "Not to us, O Lord, but to thee be the glory." Whole bands of Tartar troops broke and fled when they heard the name of the Polish hero repeated from one end to the other of the Ottoman lines. At the same moment an eclipse of the moon added to the consternation of the superstitious Moslems, who beheld with dread the crescent waning in the heavens. With a furious charge the Polish infantry seized an eminence that commanded the grand Vizier's position, when Kara Mustapha, taken by surprise at this unexpected attack, fell at once from the heights of confidence to the depths of despair. Charge upon charge was rapidly hurled upon the already wavering Moslems, whose rout soon became general. In vain the vizier tried to rally the broken hosts. "Can you not aid me!" said he to the

Constantinople. Population about three hundred and seventy thousand. In Roman history Vienna is known as Vindabona, (see Map No. VIII.,) and is remarkable as being the place where Marcus Aurelius died. After the time of Charlemagne, margraves or dukes held Vienna till the middle of the thirteenth century, soon after which it came into the possession of the house of Hapsburg. In 1484 it was taken by the Hungarians, whose king, Matthias, made it the seat of his court Since the time of Maximilian it has been the usual residence of the arch-dukes of Austria, and the emperors of Germany. About two miles from the city is Schönbrunn, the favorite summer residence of the emperor. It was twice occupied by Napoleon: the treaty of Schönbrunn was signed in it in 1808, and here the duke of Reichstadt, son of Napoleon, died in 1832. (Map No. XVII.)