WE all live a double life: the external life. Which the world sees, and the internal life of hopes and fears, joys and griefs, temptations and sins, which the world sees not, and of which it knows but little. None lead this double life more emphatically than those who are seated upon thrones. Though this historic sketch contains allu sions to all the most important events in the reign of Louis XIV., it has been the main ob jcet of the writer to develop the inner life of the palace; to lead the reader into the interior of the Louvre, the Tuileries, Versailles, and Marly, and to exhibit the monarch as a man, in the details of domestic privacy. This can more easily be done in reference to Louis XIV. Than any other king. Very many of the prominent members of his house hold left their autobiographies, filled with the minutest incidents of every-day life.