for a yearly stipend. Such affranchisements became common afterwards. Her last act was to send succors to Louis, who was taken prisoner in the East. She lived to hear of his freedom, and his determination to continue the war, and then, her maternal anxiety, connected with her extreme age, brought on a fever, which terminated her life. Louis is said to have shut himself up two whole days, when he heard of the death of his mother; abandoning himself to grief. Margaret, his wife, wept too, not for the loss of Blanche (as she told her confessor,) for Blanche had not been her friend; but for the grief of her husband. Louis was now obliged to return to his kingdom. His dress was plain; and his melancholy countenance bore the marks of defeat, but he was received with acclamations of joy. He applied himself to public business with diligence, and administered justice with impartiality. He was accustomed to seat himself under a spreading oak at his castle of Vincennes, and in person to decide the causes that were brought before him. He protected the lower classes from the oppression of the higher; and would not excuse injustice or violation of the laws even in his own brothers. He was appealed to as an arbiter by foreign nations, and in religious matters alone was he severe. and He was His religious zeal was not extinguished by his unsuccessful crusade; it awoke again in a few years, and having restored plenty and peace, he again exhausted France of its revenue, its strength, to renew the holy wars. seduced into an expedition on the coast of Africa, by the report, that the king of Tunis had been secretly converted, but when he arrived, he found him his enemy. Louis attacked him in the walls of Carthage, but fell a victim, with the flower of his army, to the pestilential air of the country. He expired in the fortyfourth year of his reign, aged fiftytwo; and was canonized by Pope Boniface VIII, in 1297. If we wish, says the candid and enlightened Sismondi, to understand the motives of Louis IX, we must look not to his interests as a king, but to his conscience. That conscience was warped and clouded by the circumstances of the times, but it was always the sole director of his conduct. We are not utterly destitute of this key to the conduct of Saint Louis. His life was written by the confessor of his wife; and, among the legends of the saints, many anecdotes are preserved, which, while they make us lament his indiscriminate faith, give us a deep impression of his purity and sincerity. In recalling the mixture of superstition and virtue, in the characters of both Louis and Blanche, our hearts are led to ask with some importunity, how far they were responsible as individuals, and how far the times in which they lived may be considered as the cause of the shadows upon their characters. When we see a devoted mother and wife amid all the blandishments of a court life in the thirteenth century, and a young king of irreproachable morals, we must feel there was some high principle within, which in the genial atmosphere of a more moral age, might have ripened into the richest virtues of Christianity. May it not be that those times, dark as they seem to us, yet had a bright side to the eye of good intention? "To the pure all things are pure," and it may be that the holy mind of Saint Louis diffused "its own radiant mist," over the bloody features of his father's life. Those deeds were recited to him by his mother as a tale of glory, at that period of life, when the assertions of the beloved are taken as the inspirations of truth; and shaping his own future course out of the dark materials which the passing times afforded, may not the crusade have been to him what it is in poetry, rather than what it must always be in fact? There is a great power of transmutation in enthusiasm, that alchemy of the heart, which in absence of gold would fain make gold of the darkest clods of the valley. We believe, indeed, that a true insight into nature and providence will obtain something better than gold, and therefore we do not envy the enthusiast his illusions, which are, after all, but new forms of clay. But we are glad not to feel obliged to judge Saint Louis harshly. His enthusiasm did not lead him into any darker elements than those his contemporaries were dealing with; not to anything more bloody or violent than the commonplace spirits of the times were engaged in. And on the other hand, whatever was touching and beautiful amidst the horrors by which he was surrounded, his justice, his fatherly tenderness to his people, his simplicity of purpose were all his own. And his character steals upon us, as a soft interlude, in the tragedy of the dark ages: "Brief rest! upon the turning billow's height, |