ration of the world. A dissolute king
was ruled by a succession of mistresses, and all the courtiers vied in
emulating the vice and extravagance of their master. Yet in this foul
compost-heap art and literature nourished with a tropical luxuriance.
Voltaire was at the height of his splendid career, the most brilliant
wit and philosopher of his age. The lightnings of his mockery attacked
with an incessant play the social, political, and religious shams of
the period. People of all classes, under the influence of his unsparing
satire, were learning to see with clear eyes what an utterly artificial
and polluted age they lived in, and the cement which bound society in a
compact whole was fast melting under this powerful solvent.

Rousseau, with his romantic philosophy and eloquence, had planted his
new ideas deep in the hearts of his contemporaries, weary with the
artifice and the corruption of a time which had exhausted itself and had
nothing to promise under the old social _regime_. The ideals uplifted in
the "Nouvelle Heloise" and the "Confessions" awakened men's minds with
a great rebound to the charms of Nature, simplicity, and a social order
untrammeled by rules or conventions. The eloquence with which these
theories were propounded carried the French people by storm, and
Rousseau was a demigod at whose shrine worshiped alike duchess and
peasant. The Encyclopedists stimulated the ferment by their literary
enthusiasm, and the heartiness with which they cooperated with the whole
current of revolutionary thought.

The very atmosphere was reeking with the prophecy of imminent
change. Versailles itself did not escape the contagion. Courtiers
and aristocrats, in worshiping the beautiful ideals set up by the new
school, which were as far removed as possible from their own effete
civilization, did not realize that they were playing with the fire which
was to burn out the whole social edifice of France with such a terrible
conflagration; for, back and beneath all this, there was a people
groaning under long centuries of accumulated wrong, in whose imbruted
hearts the theories applauded by their oppressors with a sort of
_doctrinaire_ delight were working with a fatal fever.

III.

In this strange condition of affairs Gluck found his new sphere of
labor--Gluck, himself overflowing with the revolutionary spirit, full
of the enthusiasm of reform. At first he carried everything before him.
Protected by royalty, he produced,