its intellectual development, on one point it may take its stand-that a man of thirty unmarried is looked on as a helpless, hopeless bachelor, and no girl dreams but that she will be married should she so desire it.

And notwithstanding the luxury in which these young ladies are brought up, it is a common thing to see them marry men without a shilling of fortune except their brains, and, after having been surfeited with every kind of attention and amusement, take up their quarters in a threepair-back in "Bridal Row" without a murmur, and live for a season on about the cost of the bouquets sent to them in a previous season. As far as an outsider can judge, they make contented, loving, and faithful wives; and perhaps, after all, they can not more worthily fulfill their destinies. No form of life can be more beautiful than that often practiced by English girls, of devoting a great part of their time and attention to visiting the poor and to ministration in Sunday-schools, where the motive is pure benevolence, a strong desire to alleviate misery or to root out ignorance, apart from any selfish idea that such conduct will insure their own future benefit; but, on the other hand, one often sees a character wholly devoid of that talent for real benevolence, wasting a life in a public exhibition of charity, while the poor whom she has always with her at home suffer from a spirit of discontent and dissatisfaction which might be relieved by a little natural romance, for which nature has fitted her, if circumstances had only been more favorable. For all such

"Were it not better done, as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair ?" It would, however, be assuming too much to maintain that there is any necessary incompatibility between the two forms

of living. It is quite possible that the same young lady who may sport with her (male) Amaryllis in the shade from four to six in the afternoon, may have been doing good work from ten to four. The records of the Sanitary Commission during the war showed wonderful achievements on the part of American ladies, and of these New York claimed no small share; and the splendid charitable institutions of the city itself bear witness that these duties are in no way neglected.

It does not follow that work will not be well done because play is well done. And although the walks and the rides, the drives and the dinners, the croquet parties and the evening parties, of ordinary young people may seem to be matters of very trivial interest or importance, it must be remembered that the sum of these small daily incidents powerfully affects the disposition, the manners, and the bearing of whole sections of society. We in England are too apt to think that because the best specimens of our own countrywomen and countrymen show types that are very rarely equaled and never excelled-so that the words English lady and English gentleman convey, and convey rightly, to our mind quite a distinct and different notion from mere "lady" or "gentleman"—therefore we are entitled to believe that our average Briton holds something of a superior social rank to all foreigners. But when the choice specimens have been culled out, the fact is that, owing to our inequality of condition, the residuum in Great Britain is of a dull, pompous, selfish, ungenial nature, and may learn something from much-maligned NewYork-a city whose ways are ways of pleasantness, and whose paths we may hope will be paths of peace, notwithstanding the too great smartness of Yankee lawyers and the blatant nonsense of the NewYork Herald. [From Macmillan's Magazine.

seventeenth century. The exact date of his birth is not ascertainable. But as he became procureur-général of the parliament. of Dijon by the cession of his father in the year 1637, he could not have been born much after the beginning of the century.. He died at Paris on the 3d of July, 1671..

His family had belonged for generations to the noblesse de robe. His father and grandfather were both presidents of the parliament of Dijon. It might be imagined that the position of magistrate in a country town, together with the additional staid ness which might be supposed to be derived from such family connections and associations, would have insured to a man, whatever his natural inclinations might be, a life of peaceful usefulness and humdrum monotony. But any body so imagining would have left out of his consideration the strange state of France during that wonderful time of the Fronde-a time when it was quite on the cards that footmen and ladies'-maids might come to exercise an important influence on public events and on the fortunes of princes; when the only persons of whom it could be said that it was not on the cards that they should exercise any such influence were the millions of manants, the cultivators of the soil, who constituted the mass of the population of France; a time when the natural mode of proceeding of one who sought to earwig an archbishop, was to bribe the right reverend father's favorite; when all dignitaries, potentates, powers, and persons in authority, seemed to be playing a huge game of puss-in-the-corner; when all society was dancing the hays, and every body and thing was in the place where they might least be expected to be found; when perhaps more completely than at any other time that history tells us of, the idea of duty was extinct, and men and women acted, and almost openly and wholly avowed that they acted, on no other motive save the consideration of what they conceived to be their interest and the gratification of their passions; a time when every body constantly strove to deceive every other person engaged in the huge confused game, and when deception was so much a matter of course that those who were deceived felt little or no resentment against those who had deceived them when the deceit was discovered a bad time, a thoroughly bad and despicable time, but an extremely interesting one, and, above all, a highly picturesque one.

It is also a specially difficult time to understand as it might be supposed it would be, even from what has here been said of it. When every body, high and low, conspicuous, and obscure, was busying himself, and effectually busying himself

with plots, schemes, intrigues of every sort, when the women were as active and quite as influential as the men, (for this is a notable specialty of the Fronde period,) it may be imagined that the skein becomes a complex and a raveled one. The consequence is, that of all the times and social conditions described by history, this Fronde time is one of the least satisfactorily understood by those whose reading is confined to the pages of the great historians. It is impossible that their works, let them have striven as they might to clothe the dry bones of what used to be called history with flesh and blood, should, by the general view to which they are necessarily limited, give their readers not only any accurate understanding of all the pulling of the wires which led to great and important events, but, what is far more worth having, any lively picture of the sort of way in which men and women were then living, and talking, and thinking, and acting. Fortunately, no period was ever richer in writers of memoirs. So many had stories to tell. So many, when left high and dry in their old age by the stream of active life, had no other occupation or consolation than the telling of them. But it is a case of embarrass de richesses. Few, indeed, are the readers in the present day who can dream of coping with the mass of narrative which the French mémoire writers of the seventeenth century have left us. Life is too full and too short. But there is the complete living picture of that strange time embedded in those thousands of pages. And if one could succeed in detaching a scene or two, and fitting them into such a manageable size and form as would furnish a

magic-lantern slide, without loss of the color of the original figures and facts, such a peep might suffice to give a reader a more living and concrete notion of this portion of French history than he has ever gathered from his previous studies.

On the 18th of January, 1650, an event happened which fell like a thunderbolt in the midst of the French world, and filled with amazement not only the Court and Paris, but the whole of France. This was the sudden and totally unexpected arrest of "the Princes." The reader of the French history of that period will meet with frequent reference to that event, and to a great variety of other facts as happening to, or performed by, "the Princes." The personages thus designated par excel

lence were Louis II. of Bourbon, Prince de Condé, and his younger brother, Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti. The former was the man known in French history as the Grand Condé. He was the great-grandson of Charles of Bourbon, Duke of Vendôme, and was the head of that branch of the Bourbons. "The Princes," therefore, so-called as being princes of the blood royal. Condé had done much to deserve the title of "Great." Voltaire says of him that he was a "born general." He delivered France from a great danger when, with much inferior forces, and giving battle against the advice of his council, he beat the Spaniards in the memorable fight of Rocroi, destroying in that and subsequent victories the famous Spanish infantry, at that day considered the finest in the world. Louis XIII. died in 1642. Rocroi was fought on the 19th of May, 1643. So that Condé was, perhaps fortunately for himself and for France, absent from Paris when the first troubles of the Fronde broke out. It is probable that he would have ranged himself on the side opposed to Cardinal Mazarin and the Court had he then been at leisure to busy himself with the intestine discords of his country.

Of course there could be little sympathy between any of the Grands Seigneurs of France, the remains of the old feudal nobility which Richelieu had so successfully crushed, and Mazarin. Richelieu was hated and feared. Mazarin was hated and despised. Nevertheless, when Condé, having vanquished the foreign enemies of France, and obtained an advantageous peace, ventured to Paris, and when both parties to the struggle, which was going on between Mazarin and the Court on the one hand, against the Parliament and the Frondeurs on the other, were eager to enlist the hero on their side, he took the side of the Court, probably from a real patriotic sense of duty, and contributed largely to that first pacification, which was, after all, but a hollow truce. Overt violence was stayed, but plotting went on only the more actively on all sides. Mazarin was hated equally by the Parliament and by the Grands Seigneurs. The Noblesse de l'Epée and the Noblesse de Robe were equally against him. And the fact that he was able, amid much difficulties, to maintain his power so long, is a very curious and suggestive testimony to the

efficacy of the work which his great predecessor, Richelieu, had accomplished.

But if Condé deemed it his duty to lend the weight of his name and influence to the support of the Court against the malcontent Frondeurs and Parliament, it did not follow that he was to dissemble his disgust at the spectacle of French chivalry ruled by the rod of an intriguing cardinal, or to brook the insolently ambitious projects of the upstart priest. Accordingly, he was not sparing of mordant criticism and biting ridicule of every part of Mazarin's administration. And he especially exerted himself, and plotted to prevent the marriage which the Cardinal was extremely anxious to bring about between his niece and the Duc de Mercœur.

These are the causes to which French historians generally attribute the sudden arrest of "the Princes" on the 18th of July, 1650. But there was another cause -one of those back-stair causes which history is very apt to miss, unless she seeks for them in the pages of comparatively obscure mémoire writers-which seems to have led immediately to the catastrophe. Among the gentlemen who "served" Condé, was one Jarzé, who had conceived an absurd notion that the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria, looked on him with eyes of affection, and absolutely sent her a declaration of love! The Queen took the first opportunity of reading him a severe lecture before all the Court, ending by commanding him never to come into her sight again. Condé most unreasonably, moved probably by a desire of picking a quarrel with Mazarin, chose to consider himself affronted by the disgrace put upon his follower; and, demanding an interview with the minister, insolently required that Jarzé should be received by the Queen that very evening. Anne submitted; but it is easy to imagine what must have been her feelings while doing so. Nevertheless, so important, so startling a step as the arrest of the victor of Rocroi was not to be undertaken lightly; and it was thought necessary to procure the consent of Gaston, the late king's brother, who was lieutenant-general of the kingdom. To this end Anne wrote with her own hand a note to Gondi, that most extraordinary of archbishops, who is better known in history as the Cardinal de Retz. Gondi was at that time one of the most popular men in Paris, and a leader of the

opposition in the Parliament. The summons of the Queen, however, brought him to her at once; the terms of a coalition between the Fronde and the Court were quickly agreed upon, and Gondi undertook, and succeeded in, the task of obtaining Gaston's consent to the proposed step. That obtained, the Queen did not hesitate an instant in signing the fatal order, which was the cause of a new series of troubles and civil war to the unhappy country. "The Princes" were arrested as they were leaving the Palais Royal, and were safely lodged in Vincennes before a soul in Paris knew any thing about it. From Vincennes the prisoners were removed to Marcoussy, and thence to Havre. They were three in number-Condé himself, his brother the Prince de Conti, and the Duc de Longueville, who had married their sister, and who must always be understood to be included in the mention of "the Princes," so often met with in the records of those times. Condé was born in 1621, and was therefore twentynine years old at the time of his arrest.

Immense was the sensation produced all over France when this extraordinary news became known. People could not believe their ears. Nobody knew what it meant, or what it portended. But especially the news fell like a thunderbolt in Burgundy, and Dijon, the capital of it. That was Condé's special country; there were the principal castles and strong places belonging to him; there was the greatest number of the closest friends and adherents of his family; there the chief seat of his influence.

Now our friend Pierre Lenet, and his fathers before him, had always been special friends and followers of the Condés; and Pierre himself had been particularly distinguished by the present Prince, who, among other marks of favor, had been godfather to one of his children. And 'Lenet, whatever else he may have been, now in the time of his patron's adversity proved himself a faithful friend and most devoted partisan. Nor was he a man to be content with wringing his hands and lamenting, while keeping quiet to see how matters would go, like most of the rest of his fellow-townsmen. He instantly conceived projects of the widest and most audacious scope for the recovery of his patron's liberty. He aimed at nothing less than raising such a flame throughout the

country as should produce a civil war, the first result of which should be the destruction of Mazarin.

Lenet had been on the point of starting from Dijon for Paris. The last thing before leaving the town he went to the castle, to take leave of the two commanders, to whose joint care Condé had committed it, and to enable himself to give his patron an account of the state of his fortress. This was on the 21st of January, 1650. He found the two officers-Bussière and Comean their names were in a strange state of agitation. For awhile they would not tell Lenet what it was that was moving them.

But at last they let out the fact that a courtier had that morning reached the castle with tidings of the arrest of the Princes!

Lenet's first thought was to encourage these men to be firm in doing their duty to the Prince; he inquired into the condition of the castle and its means of defence, and treated it as a matter of course that they would hold it against all comers to the last extremity. Then abandoning the idea of his journey, he set himself to consider what best could be done in Dijon. Thinking over the matter as he walked home, he tells us that it appeared to him beyond all doubt that a "general revolution in favor of the Prince and against the Cardinal would declare itself, and that twenty-four hours would not pass without bringing tidings of a rising. Still less could I doubt," he goes on to say, "that we should be able to excite in Burgundy, by means of the strongholds, the friends, and the troops the Prince possessed there, similar movements to those which I foresaw in Paris; which would give the example to the neighboring provinces, and especially to Champagne, which was under the government of the Prince de Conti. I thought, too, that Normandy, where the government and most part of the strong places were in the hands of the Duc de Longueville, or of his relations, where he had many friends, and where there was much discontent, would at once declare itself, as well as Guienne or Provence, where the disaffection of last year was by no means altogether healed."

He goes on to assign sundry other reasons for feeling sure that this, that, and the other part of the country would assuredly rise. Nevertheless, there was some reason to fear that a formidable rising

might have the result of causing Mazarin to put the Princes to death in their prison. But, on mature reflection, he came to the conclusion that the Cardinal was not the man to dare any so violent a measure, "particularly if the young Duc d'Enghien, (Condé's son,) the Princess Dowager, (his mother,) the Princesse de Condé, (she was a niece of Richelieu,) and the Duchess of Longueville remained at liberty, as was confidently reported to be the case, and if they could withdraw themselves out of the reach of the Court."

"I at once therefore dispatched a courier with three letters for the three Princesses." It is curious to observe the capable man thus taking command of the family interests in the time of storm. Lenet had never held any particular office in the household of the Prince, or had ever been in a position either in the world generally, or in his relations with the Prince's family, to make it natural that he should thus put himself forward to say what should be done in the critical circumstances in which the family was placed; but he felt himself to be the man that was needed, and seized the opportunity of launching himself on a sea of plots, and intrigues, and adventures, which made up exactly the sort of life for which he was fitted, and calculated to shine in. Not that Lenet was altogether so much a stranger to the grand monde as another procureur-général of a provincial parliament would in all probability have been. The special favor of Condé had often kept him near his person, and the credit and influence he was supposed to enjoy with the Prince caused his acquaintance to be sought by all the crowd of young nobles of both sexes, who, for one reason or another, wished to pay court to the young hero of Rocroi. Thus we find him to

have been an intimate friend and companion of Bussy Rabutin, Madame Sevigné's well-known cousin; and there is a letter in verse extant, which Lenet and Bussy wrote conjointly to Madame SeviBussy wrote conjointly to Madame Sevigné and her husband when they were rusticising in Brittany. This epistle made rather a succès de société in its day; and as French critics have praised it, and it is a good specimen of the sort of literary play which was then so much in fashion in French society, the reader is here presented with an English version of it

"TO M. LE MARQUIS AND MDE. LA MARQUISE SEVIGNE.

"To you, good friends, who've taken root
In Brittany, a kind salute!

You stay-at-homes in every season,
Who love your fields beyond all reason,
Greeting and health! Although observe
This letter's more than you deserve.
Yet moved by ancient feelings friendly,
In pity these few lines we send ye,
Being loath to see your primest hours
Obscurely pass 'mid village boors,
And grieved that at Rochers* you waste
Moments your friends would keenly taste.
Perhaps your minds, quite tranquil grown,
Now censure all the fuss of town;
And 'mid your fields, afar from riot,
Enjoy pure laziness in quiet.
Perhaps your plan, to us so comic,
May have good reasons economic;
Your rustic life may find excuses
If doubled rent-roll it produces.
Then 'tis no doubt a pleasant thing
To be kotoo'd to like the king,
And to be named full reverently
Conjointly with his majesty

At fair or dance, or when the priest
Uplifts his voice at some church feast,
And says, 'Let's pray with one accord
For our good king, and noble lord;
And for his lady, that she be

From childbirth perils safe and free;
Likewise for all their offspring dear
From this time forth for many a year!
If any person here desires

To rent the farm the lease expires
To-day at noon, when he may meet
My Lord, upon the affair to treat.
A De Profundis now rehearse

For all his noble forefathers.'
(Although for aught that we can tell,
Said forefathers may be in h-1!)
Such honors you may seek in vain
Elsewhere than on your own domain;
'Tis something too a tax to raise
On every beast that octroi pays;
To sell all manner of permissions
And walk the foremost in processions;
T'assemble folks when'er your wish,
To help you hunt, or help you fish;
And boors most soundly to belabor
Who shirk of plough on spade the labor."

There are eight more lines, which contain
plays on words impossible to translate.
And no doubt the reader has already said,
Oh, jam satis!

In days long afterwards, when Lenet's plottings and schemings were all over, and he was at length at rest, Madame de Sevigne speaks of him as having had "de l'esprit comme douze," and again, in another whom we often laughed so much, for there letter, as "our poor friend Lenet, with never was a more laughing youth than ours in every way." Lenet, therefore,

* The name of Madame de Sevigné's home in Brittany.