very period has produced its heroes and its politicians,
every people has experienced revolutions; the histories of all are of
nearly equal value to those who desire merely to store their memory with
facts. But the thinker, and that still rarer person the man of taste,
recognises only four epochs in the history of the world--those four
fortunate ages in which the arts have been perfected: the great age of
the Greeks, the age of Caesar and of Augustus, the age which followed the
fall of Constantinople, and the age of Louis XIV.; which last approached
perfection more nearly than any of the others.

On the death of Louis XIII., his queen, Anne of Austria, owed her
acquisition of the regency to the Parlement of Paris. Anne was obliged
to continue the war with Spain, in which the brilliant victories of the
young Duc d'Enghein, known to fame as the Great Conde, brought him
sudden glory and unprecedented prestige to the arms of France.

But internally the national finances were in a terribly unsatisfactory
state. The measures for raising funds adopted by the minister Mazarin
were the more unpopular because he was himself an Italian. The Paris
Parlement set itself in opposition to the minister; the populace
supported it; the resistance was organised by Paul de Gondi, afterwards
known as the Cardinal de Retz. The court had to flee from Paris to St.
Germain. Conde was won over by the queen regent; but the nobles, hoping
to recover the power which Richelieu had wrenched from them, took the
popular side. And their wives and daughters surpassed them in energy. A
very striking contrast to the irresponsible frivolity with which the
whole affair was conducted is presented by the grim orderliness with
which England had at that very moment carried through the last act in
the tragedy of Charles I. In France the factions of the Fronde were
controlled by love intrigues.

Conde was victorious. But he was at feud with Mazarin, made himself
personally unpopular, and found himself arrested when he might have made
himself master of the government. A year later the tables were turned;
Mazarin had to fly, and the Fronde released Conde. The civil war was
renewed; a war in which no principles were at stake, in which the
popular party of yesterday was the unpopular party of to-day; in which
there were remarkable military achievements, much bloodshed, and much
suffering, and which finally wore itself out in 1653, when Mazarin
returned to undisputed