instead of being directed upon the field,
circled in the breast, and sparkled out in genial talk and graceful
forms. The idolatrous devotion to woman, which had nerved the arm of
the knight, and upheld chivalry, now subsided into a respectful
sympathy with woman, and, animating the heart of the gentleman,
became the ornament and sweetener of society, the inspiring basis of
intercourse. In consequence of the stimulus and position resulting
from the extreme honor paid to the great feudal dames and their
beautiful sisters, in that palmy era, the higher class of women in
France obtained a social development whose advantages they have never
since lost.

France also had another period quite unique for the varied and
wonderful development it gave to the genius and character of woman.
An anonymous writer, in the English "National Review," has described
this epoch in a passage of marked wisdom and brilliancy. "The court
of France," he says, "in the reign of Louis XIII, the regency of Anne
of Austria, and the early part of the reign of Louis XIV, produced a
company of ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract of
history looks dim. Cousin has nobly drawn the portraits of their
leaders. The wars of the League had left the great nobles of France
in the enjoyment of an amount of personal freedom, importance, and
dignity, greater than was ever before or since the lot of any
aristocracy. Chivalrous traditions; the custom of appeal to arms for
the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have
cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as
many years; the worship of womanhood, carried to a pharisaical
strictness of observance, were conditions, which, though socially
disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual worth, power, and
majesty of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a
corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to
secure that personal predominance which it is their instinct to seek.
The political state of France was one which afforded the members of
its court extraordinary occasions for the display of character. That
state was one of a vast transition. Feudal privileges had to be
either moderated, defined, and constitutionalized, or else destroyed.
The revolution which was about to operate in England, and to end in
liberty, was already working in France with a manifestly opposite
destiny. Richelieu and Mazarin were slowly and surely bringing about