the Abbé Edgeworth to Louis XVI. on the scaffold, "ascend to heaven!"
The seventh canto is in some respects the most remarkable. It opens by telling us that the infinite goodness of God has placed among us two beneficent beings, always lovable inhabitants of earth, supports in trouble, treasures in poverty; the one is Sleep, the other Hope. St Louis summons both to Henry. Sleep heard the call in his secret caves; softly he came through the fresh bowers; the winds were hushed at sight of him; happy dreams, children of hope, fluttered towards the Prince and covered him with olive and laurel, mixed with their own poppies. Then the sainted Louis, placing on the forehead of the sleeper his own diadem, exhorts him, saying that it is a small thing to be a hero or a king without a share of enlightening grace, and that, less to reward than to instruct him, he will show him the secrets of a more durable empire. He then invites him to fly with him to the bosom of God Himself.
Frederick the Great specially admired the device of taking Henry to heaven and hell in spirit, in his sleep, rather than in the body, as Æneas and Ulysses went. "The single idea," says the admiring monarch, " of attributing to Henry's dream what he sees in heaven and hell, and what is prognosticated to him in the temple of Destiny, is worth the whole of the 'Iliad;' for the dream brings all which happens within the rules of reality, whereas the journey of Ulysses into hell is devoid of all the ornaments which might have given an air of truth to the ingenious fiction of Homer."
Most readers will concur with Frederick so far as to consider it judicious to make the dream the medium
