the envoys, “to cooperate, so far as I may be able, in what your master demands of me; meanwhile, I exhort you to have patience, and be of good courage.”  This was his last political act, and his last concern with the affairs of the world; henceforth he was occupied only with pious effusions which had a bearing at one time on his hopes for his soul, at another on those Christian interests which had been so dear to him all his life.  He kept repeating his customary orisons in a low voice, and he was heard murmuring these broken words:  “Fair Sir God, have mercy on this people that bideth here, and bring them back to their own land!  Let them not fall into the hands of their enemies, and let them not be constrained to deny Thy name!” And at the same time that he thus expressed his sad reflections upon the situation in which he was leaving his army and his people, he cried from time to time, as he raised himself on his bed, “Jerusalem!  Jerusalem!  We will go up to Jerusalem!” During the night of the 24th 25th of August he ceased to speak, all the time continuing to show that he was in full possession of his senses; he insisted upon receiving extreme unction out of bed, and lying upon a coarse sack-cloth covered with cinders, with the cross before him; and on Monday, the 25th of August, 1270, at three P.M., he departed in peace, whilst uttering these his last words:  “Father, after the example of the Divine Master, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!”

[Illustration:  The Death of St. Louis——­64]

CHAPTER XVIII.——­THE KINGSHIP IN FRANCE.

That the kingship occupied an important place and played an important part in the history of France is an evident and universally recognized fact.  But to what causes this fact was due, and what particular characteristics gave the kingship in France that preponderating influence which, in weal and in woe, it exercised over the fortunes of the country, is a question which has been less closely examined, and which still remains vague and obscure.  This question it is which we would now shed light upon and determine with some approach to precision.  We cannot properly comprehend and justly appreciate a great historical force until we have seen it issuing from its primary source and followed it in its various developments.

At the first glance, two facts strike us in the history of the kingship in France.  It was in France that it adopted soonest and most persistently maintained its fundamental principle, heredity.  In the other monarchical states of Europe—­in England, in Germany, in Spain, and in Italy—­divers principles, at one time election, and at another right of conquest, have been mingled with or substituted for the heredity of the throne; different dynasties have reigned; and England has had her Saxon, Danish, and Norman kings, her Plantagenets, her Tudors, her Stuarts, her Nassaus, her Brunswicks.  In Germany,