And some, whom feeble love’s excess,
Through terror, tempts to murderousness.
And at that thought the big drops rose
In pity for her people’s woes;
And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen,
And vowing in her princely will
That they should thrive and bless her still.”
Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the “vulgar herd,” that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance—by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff’s bread bill to his running account for sack—one of Anne of Austria’s sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering in propriâ personâ,—the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress—but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: “that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment’s thought
[O, I have ta’en too little thought of this!]