Loftiness. If haughty is always taken badly, loftiness is sometimes a good, sometimes a bad quality, depending on the position one holds, the situation in which one finds oneself, and those with whom one engages. The finest example of a noble and well-placed loftiness is that of Popilius, who traced a circle around a powerful Syrian king and said to him: you will not leave this circle without satisfying the republic or without attracting its vengeance. A private individual resorting to this would be insolent; Popilius, who represented Rome, put all the grandeur of Rome in his conduct and was able to be a modest man.

There are men whose loftiness expresses generosity and the reader will say that these are the most estimable. After being pressed by M. Sum, a Polish envoy, not to receive King Stanislas, the Duke of Orleans, regent of the kingdom, responded to him: tell your master that France is always a shelter for kings.

The loftiness with which Louis XIV sometimes treated his enemies was of another kind and less sublime. One cannot refrain here from remarking on what Father Bouhours said of Pompone, Minister of State: he had a loftiness , a firmness of soul , that nothing could bend . Louis XIV, in a personal account (that can be found in The Century of Louis XIV ) says of the same minister that he had neither firmness nor dignity. The word is often employed in an elevated style and in the plural in French: the loftiness of the human spirit, les hauteurs de l’esprit humain and in a simpler style, one can say, he was lofty , that he made enemies by being lofty .

Those who have studied the human heart deeply will think further on this little article.