advice, never again to have a prime minister to rule over him. The infant king was only four years and a half old when his mother commenced her Regency. The ceremony of her installation, according to the then existing forms, carried with it an air of inexpressible absurdity. A solemn bed of justice (the highest court held under the old French monarchy) was convened; the royal child was placed on an elevated throne, surrounded by all the magnates of the land; he was made to say, that he accorded the regency to his mother, and to go through a form of signing his name to a document. A chancellor on his knees received the sovereign's ordinance, and repeated aloud the express command of the king. Then all bent their heads and knees in token of obedience, the little puppet was carried away to the nursery, and the Queen assumed her seat. The farce seemed almost as preposterous as the elevation of Caligula's charger to the senate and consulship. Richelieu, the bitter and persevering enemy of Anne of Austria, died in December, 1642. The King, Louis XIII., who was attacked by a mortal disease nearly at the same time, followed him to the grave in May, 1643. When on his death-bed, not having summoned the Queen to a parting adieu, she despatched Monsieur de Chavigny to demand pardon for all that had ever offended him in her conduct, and to implore him to believe that she had no participation in the conspiracy of Chalais against his life, and that she never contemplated a marriage with his brother. Louis received her ambassador with coldness. "In the state to which I am reduced," said he, "it is my duty to pardon, but I cannot be lieve her." The Cardinal, though hated and feared, was admired in life, and remembered long after his death. The King, whom he had reduced to a nonentity, was forgotten almost before he was buried. As he disliked and despised his wife, he was determined, if possible, to leave her no power over his infant heir, and by his last will appointed a Regency, in which (although she was not totally excluded) her power was so limited as to be little bettter than nominal. But the monarch, who was ill obeyed when living, was not likely to be treated with much respect when numbered with the things which had been. His widow had interest enough to cause the will of her deceased husband to be annulled, within four and twenty hours after his death, by a decree of the parliament of Paris. She had the precedent of Mary de Medicis, who, after the death of Henry IV., had been declared unlimited regent during the minority of her son. The precedent was admitted, and custom, by which the Regency was bestowed on the King's mother, passed into a law almost as fundamental as the Salic ordinance by which women were excluded entirely from the succession. Riencourt, in his "Historyent, of Louis XIV.," says the will of Louis XIII. was confirmed in parliament for so much of it as related to the Queen being named in the Regency, but that portion was entirely abrogated which limited her authority, or encum bered with a council. Thus the only act of justice which this unamiable monarch, miscalled by strange perversion, Louis the Just, had ever executed, was set aside, while the evils he had done the state remained in full activity, and prepared the way for heavier calamities, under which the nation was doomed to suffer for the next century and a half. According to Voltaire, Anne at the same time made Mazarin master of France and of herself. He had previously obtained tha power over her which an artful man will readily acquire over a woman, born without strength sufficient to govern, yet with constancy enough to make a choice and persist in it. Other memoirs state that Mazarin owed his elevation to the failure of Potier, Bishop of Beauvais, whom she had at first chosen for minister, but who broke down under the arduous office for want of capacity. He retained the name of minister for some time, that the nation might not be shocked too suddenly by an immediate choice of a duplicate cardinal, who was also a foreigner. But whatever might be the deficiencies of Potier, he could scarcely have been such a fool as to commence his short ministry by declaring to the Hollanders, that the only terms on which they could hope to continue in alliance with France would be by the entire nation becoming Roman Catholics. To have been consist he must have announced the same ultimatum to the Swedes. Yet grave historians have repeated this absurdity, and adopted it as a fact. So much for trusting popular reports, which are either invented altogether, or purposely exaggerated. It is too difficult for decision to state what Mazarin was-all that posterity can be sure of is, what he did. At first he affected moderation, and appeared with a retinue as modest as that of Richelieu had been ostentatious. He assumed, in his manner, affability and complaisance on all those occasions where his great predecessor had displayed inflexible pride and haughtiness. The Queen was anxious to render her government popular, and in this she was supported by Gaston, Duke of Orleans, brother to the late King, and the renowned Prince de Condé, for the present her friends, and who appeared to have no emulation but in serving the state. But matters did not long go on harmoniously. Taxes became necessary to support the wars against Spain and the Emperor, and places were created to feed the patronage of the court. The parliament refused to ratify the claims of the ministry, and a casus belli civilis was very soon established. As usual, the immediate cause arose out of a trifle. Broussell, Counsellor-clerk of the great Chamber of Peers, a man without capacity, note, or merit, known only for his unvarying opposition to the court, being seized on a slight pretence, the people rose in insurrection, and gave way to more violent grief than if the best monarch in the world had been suddenly snatched from them by death. To this they were stirred up by the coadjutor to the Archbishop of Paris, John Francis Paul de Gondi, afterwards Cardinal de Retz, a remarkable, though unscrupulous man, daring, turbulent, and ambitious; a sort of Catiline in the seventeenth century, and the first bishop who carried on a civil war without the convenient mask of religion. At twenty-three he headed a conspiracy against the life of Richelieu, and after engaging in many intrigues, amatory as well as political, and fighting several duels, preached to the people as a reformer, repented of his debaucheries, which had injured his constitution, became Archbishop of Corinth, and a Prince of the Church. His latter years were tolerably respectable, and made some atonement for his early irregularities. He died in 1679, having written his Memoirs, in which he delineates his own character and actions with more impartiality than autobiographers usually display when writing of themselves. At the period of which we are treating, he set himself up as a popular demagogue, excited the parliament and the people against the court and the government, and led the way to the domestic troubles which so long harassed and depopulated France, under the designation of the war of the Fronde; a congenial successor to the earlier rebellion of the League. Two authorities, expressly established to maintain peace-an archbishop and a parliament having declared war, the people naturally considered every description of violence as not only tolerated but commanded. The Queen dared not appear in public for fear of outrageous insult. She was universally called "Dame Anne;" and if any other epithet was added, it never failed to be coarse and unmannerly. Songs and ballads derogatory to her virtue were sung under the palace windows; and all the scurrilous wit of the time was lavished in lampoons on her and her reputed paramour, the Cardinal. In these disturbances, the royal family fled from Paris, and returned; fled a second time, and a second time came back again. Condé was their spear and shield for a while; but, disgusted with Mazarin, he ridiculed him, and changed sides when persecuted in his turn. Some of the conflicts that took place would have been utterly ridiculous but for the great names that were mixed up on either side. De Retz had a regiment under his own command, which was denominated the "Regiment of Corinth," because their colonel was titular Archbishop of Corinth. These Parisian John Gilpins numbered one thousand men, gayly caparisoned, and fluttering in feathers and embroidery. The Prince de Condé besieged three hundred thousand citizens with eight thousand regular soldiers. The former came out to fight, but their hearts quailed, and they fled upon the approach of only two hundred of the royal army. The valorous Regiment of Corinth gave way before a section of forty, commanded by a sub-lieutenant. The profane wits christened this defeat, "The First Epistle to the Corinthians. The coadjutor-archbishop took his seat in parliament with the handle of a poniard peeping from out the pocket of his cassock. "See!" said some lookerson, "there is our archbishop's breviary!" In the midst of all this confusion, the nobility assembled in a body at the monastery of the Augustines, and could find nothing more important to occupy their attention than a debate on a tabaret, or permission of sitting down before the Queen, which her majesty had granted to Madame de Pons. The national levity was never more strongly characterized. taire, though questionable in his facts, is acute in his observations. He says, "The civil dissensions which raged in England precisely at the same time, may serve extremely well to show the distinctive features of the two nations. in their domestic discords, exhibited a sombre cruelty and a sensible madness; their battles were bloody; they decided all things by a direct appeal to the sword; scaffolds were erected for the vanquished; their king, being seized as a prisoner, was Vol The English, brought before a court of justice, questioned concerning the abuse of his power, of which he had been before accused, condemned to lose his head, and was executed in presence of his people, with great order, and the same formality of justice as if it had been the execution of one of his subjects; nor was London, in the course of these sad disorders, ever in the least sensible of, or affected by, the calamities which are the ordinary concomitants and consequences of civil wars." The French, on the contrary, precipitated themselves into seditions through mere wantonness and caprice; women were ever at the head of factions, and cabals were formed and dissipated by love. The Duchess de Longueville engaged Turenne, then just made a marshal of France by Mazarin, to cause the army, which he commanded for the King, to revolt. Turenne failed in this, and quitted that army, of which he was general, to please a woman who sought only to make him a political tool, and laughed at his passion. As a just retribution, he was afterwards defeated at Rhétel by the Marshal Du Plessis-Praslin. When the Marshal d'Hocquincourt took Peronne, he dedicated his conquest to the Duchess de Montbazon in these words "Peronne is surrendered to the fairest of the fair." The Duke de la Rochefacault, wounded in the battle of the Faubourg de St. Antoine, and temporarily deprived of his sight, addressed the following couplet to the Duchess de Longueville : The effects, immediate and remote-the memorials of all these troubles, have passed away with succeeding races and new institutions. Two phrases still perpetuate them, which were created at the time. The partisans of Condé were called PetitsMaitres, because they desired to become masters of the state; the name is now applied to finical, conceited youths of good families, with slenderly furnished brains. The Parliamentarians and populace were denominated Frondeurs, from fronde, a sling, as if they hurled opposition in the teeth of the Government. The term at present is used to signify the grumblers and dissatisfied, who find fault with every thing, and resemble the drunken chartist who, not many years ago, paraded the streets of London, vociferating, "No Queen!--no Constitution !-no nothing at all!" When peace was restored, the QueenRegent sacrificed Mazarin to the clamors of the people, as Charles I. had surrendered Strafford and Laud to the same senseless but controlling outcry. When the young King attained his majority, he recalled him, as if so long accustomed to fetters, that unscrewing them was a punishment. He came back more powerful than ever, and the Queen-mother, no longer regent, felt that he had got beyond her. Mazarin died in 1661. Anne of Austria survived him five years, and died in 1666, aged sixty-five. She had long suffered under the agony of an incurable cancer. When her son assumed the reins of government, on the death of the Cardinal, she quitted the bustling arena of politics, on which she had played such an active part, and dedicated the remainder of her days to pious exercises and charitable practice. Her character has been summed up, perhaps with too much severity, by a bitter republican, Louis Prudhomme,* who promoted the first Revolution by his writings, yet was denounced by Robespierre as a Royalist, and with difficulty made his escape to England. While in London, he published a volume, entitled "The Crimes of the Queens of France, from the Commencement of the Monarchy to Marie Antoinette." This is his portraiture of Anne of Austria, which must be received with due qualification, when we remember the source from whence it emanates:-"Anne of Austria died tranquilly at the court, in her sixtyfifth year, without ever having done any good, while, at the same time, she committed less evil than many others. We cannot discover in her a single virtue, but an abundance of vices and defects; her whole life was passed in intrigues and quarrels, and we may presume she would have been more detestable had her feeble genius not been subjected to the ascendency of two able men, who felt no disposition to let her participate in the harvest of their own crimes." * Prudhomme's mind seems to have had no bias except for the examination of abuses and misdeeds. He wrote innumerable pamphlets, all agaiust the Government; "A General History of the Crimes committed during the Revolution ;" and in 1789 established a paper called The Journals of the Revolutions of Paris. His selected motto was, "The great seem to us to be great only because we are on our knees--let us rise!" Prudhomme, in spite of his ultra principles, escaped the guillotine, and lived up to eighty-two, dying as recently as 1830. VOLTAIRE. lation under the calamities of life." Accord- rendered him skeptical of their existence in others; thus, because the privileged priestTHERE are very few men who have been so hood of his day were corrupt and hypocritimuch written about, or talked of, as Voltaire; cal, he rejected the Christianity which they scarcely any who have composed so volumi- libelled and misrepresented. Madame de nously themselves, and none whose writings Talmond once said to him, "I think, sir, have produced the same amount of mischief. that a true philosopher should never write We may safely place him in the front rank but to render mankind less vicious and of those who have misemployed brilliant unhappy than they are. Now you do quite talents in the dissemination of unqualified the contrary. You are perpetually exclaimevil. Turn over his seventy volumes, anding against that religion which alone is able what can we extract from them that increases to restrain wickedness, and afford us consoour veneration for the Deity, or our respect for man? His philosophy is a compound of glittering, shallow sophistries; his histories are fabulous exaggerations: and his fables are a string of the grossest indecencies, seasoned up to congenial palates by sarcastic wit. His style is the more dangerous and seductive, from being always clear, plausible, and pleasant. He sneers away a moral system in a few pointed words, and shakes a religious creed by a sparkling allegory. He affects no mysticism, and determines to be understood by all who read him. He has no depth of learning, but an infinity of invention, a quick power of applying what he knows, and an unlimited command of language, without effort or study. Dr. Johnson said of him truly, to his antagonist Freron, that "he was a shallow scholar, endowed with a most bitter genius;" and Warburton observed, with no less pleasantry than truth, that "he writes indifferently well upon every thing." Warton and Lord Holland, on the other hand, while eulogizing his unquestioned ability, pronounce him a writer of deep research. He has no belief in honesty or disinterested-pas se tenir contre un pareil spectacle!" Shakness, and laughs at the chimera of moral responsibility. Such a man was admirably adapted, by the general turn of his mind, and the power of his versatile abilities, to ruin a kingdom, overthrow a government, and foment a revolution. Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists, accelerated a crisis which would have taken place without them, but was hurried rapidly on by their pernicious doctrines. Voltaire treated of many subjects--history, philosophy, theology; poetry, dramatic, epic, and burlesque; biography, didactic disputation, and romance. On the most opposite topics he displays ever the same want of feeling and absence of human sympathy, the constant sting of sarcasm, the monotonous repetition of dreary unbelief, the constitutional disregard of truth, and the love of startling paradoxes, which he is determined to establish at any cost. His own nature was devoid of generous emotions, and speare's death-bed of Cardinal Beaufort is not a poetical imagination. Cardinal Dubois, the preceptor and minister of the Regent Orleans, died, as Voltaire died after him, in the most horrible tortures of mind and body. This Dubois was a fearful swearer. His papers were always in confusion, and when searching for any particular document, which he never could find, he thundered out anathemas which made the listeners shudder. One of his clerks once had the boldness to say to him, "I wonder your eminence does not engage a man to swear for you-only think how much time you would thus gain for business." Duclos, who filled the office of historiographer of France after Voltaire had resigned it, evidently pointed at his predecessor when he wrote as follows: "I am under the necessity of finding fault with those authors who, on the pretence of combating superstitions (which would be a very as a sovereign, I should most assuredly have paid my respects to so distinguished an individual; but I travel as a private gentleman, and am anxious to preserve all the punctilios that are annexed to that character. A gentleman cannot go to see a man who has been caned, and who has been still further disgraced by some decisions of the courts of justice against him." The first of his publications which got Vol laudable motive if it were restrained within the bounds of virtue and prudence), endeavor to sap the foundations of morality, and loosen the bands of society; the more senseless, as they themselves would be in the most danger, if they were to succeed in making proselytes. The pernicious effects which they produce upon their converts is to render them, in their youth, useless and dangerous citizens and scandalous criminals, and in advanced age wretched and miserable men; for there cantaire into mischief was the volume entitled be but few of them who, at that time of life, "Lettres Philosophiques," which gave such can possess the infamous advantage over offence by its profanity, that the Parliament their fellows of becoming so completely of Paris ordered the book to be burnt, and abandoned as to be careless about the future warrants were issued for apprehending the consequences of their past lives; for, as author. He had already been imprisoned in Juvenal has finely observedthe Bastile for a libel on the government, of which he was guiltless. His heroic poem of the "Henriade" recovered his popularity with the court, and brought him a large subscription. This once lauded, but cold, declamatory epic, is now forgotten; few attempt to read it, and a very small proportion have patience to wade through to the end. One of his most detestable productions is the ribald burlesque called "La Pucelle d'Orleans," in which he endeavors to degrade, by ridicule and impurity, the memory of one of the noblest heroines the world has ever produced. No subject is sacred from the lampooner; and such are the lamentable eccentricities of public taste, that educated readers and polite audiences are found to encourage, listen to, and laugh at the most coarse and vulgar travesties of Shakspeare himself. "Exemplo quodcunque malo committitur, ipsi Displicet auctori, prima est hac ultio, quod se Judice nemo nocens absolvitur.'" Whoe'er commits a crime is sure to feel By guilt itself, as its own punishment; Voltaire was fond of money, and although he had an ample income, he wrote as much for gain as fame. He brought out a tragedy called Brutus, and had a share in a merchant vessel of that name. His tragedy was damned (owing, as he said, to the bad acting of Mademoiselle Dangeville), and his ship made a successful voyage. "Well," said the wit, "one of my Brutuses has made amends for the other." He was one of the most extreme sycophants and cringers to kings and the great that ever existed. To their faces, and in his epistolary correspondence with them, he flattered and fawned. Behind their backs he sneered and affected republicanism. "Thanks to fortune," he wrote to a friend, from Ferney, "I am here without care and without kings." He published verses in praise of the Duc de Choiseul when he was in power, and afterwards warmly complimented M. de Maupeon who displaced him. M. de Choiseul, to show his contempt at this double-dealing, placed a representation of the head of Voltaire upon a weathercock on one of the wings of his chateau at Chanteloup. When the Emperor Joseph travelled through Switzerland, he neglected to visit Voltaire. He was asked by the learned Baron Haller why he had not called upon that celebrated writer. The Emperor replied, "Had I travelled merely "Candide" is, perhaps, the wittiest book that ever was written. Neither Rabelais nor Swift have any thing to equal it; but the intolerable indecency can only be attractive to incipient rakes, or worn-out sensualists. The ostensible object is the same as that of "Rasselas," but treated with as wide a contrast as the minds and principles of the writers diverged. Dr. Johnson shows the inevitable calamities of life, and reconciles man to them by pious resignation. Voltaire turns every thing into ridicule, and laughs at the decrees of Providence, as if existence was one continued farce, and all the transactions of men a comic pantomime. Every chapter in "Rasselas ter in "Rasselas " is a moral; every section of "Candide" works up to a heartless jest. In the first work we are taught the important lesson, to be contented within the sphere in which we are placed by the ordinance of an infinite wisdom; in the latter, we are told that we are the helpless victims of caprice or accident. In "Rasselas," the reader is arrested and instructed by reflections |