rlier part of the English revolution was almost entirely of a
religious character, whilst in the Fronde the religious element did not
intervene at all, thanks to the enlightened protection enjoyed by the
Protestants. It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our
British troubles at that moment. No sternness, no reality; love-letters
and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful
earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents;
the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolised; religion
ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible.
All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting
motives of party politics. The dissensions of the Fronde accordingly
produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled
respect. The great Conde and the famous Turenne showed military talent
of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of
character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those five or
six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing
combinations of a kaleidoscope; Conde and Turenne always on opposite
sides--for each changed his party as often as the other; battles
prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both
sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and
vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops
fighting like gladiators, and intriguing like the vulgarest
conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended
with cheers and laughter; the highest in the land caballing, cheating,
and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:--no country was ever so
split into faction, or so denuded of great men.

But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in
what seemed an inextricable chaos, the monarchical principle, strange to
say, still burned brightly in the hearts of all the French. Even in
their fights and quarrelings there was a deep reverence entertained for
the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of strength; and
when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661,
saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilised
society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a King, as
an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the
Thirteenth, the Regency, and the Fronde, and on