played with
dolls. _Briche_, a game in which a brick and a small stick was used, were
also a favourite. _Martiaus_, or small quoits, wolf or fox, blind man's
buff, hide and seek, quoits, &c., were all girls' games. The greater part
of these amusements were enlivened by a chorus, which all the girls sang
together, or by dialogues sung or chanted in unison.

[Illustration: Fig. 181.--Allegorical Scene of one of the Courts of Love
in Provence--In the First Compartment, the God of Love, Cupid, is sitting
on the Stump of a Laurel-tree, wounding with his Darts those who do him
homage, the Second Compartment represents the Love Vows of Men and
Women.--From the Cover of a Looking-glass, carved in Ivory, of the end of
the Thirteenth Century.]

[Illustration: The Chess-Players.

After a miniature of "_The Three Ages of Man_", a ms. of the fifteenth
century attributed to Estienne Porchier. (Bibl. of M. Ambroise
Firmin-Didot.)

The scene is laid in one of the saloons of the castle of
Plessis-les-Tours, the residence of Louis XI; in the player to the right,
the features of the king are recognisable.]

If children had their games, which for many generations continued
comparatively unchanged, so the dames and the young ladies had theirs,
consisting of gallantry and politeness, which only disappeared with those
harmless assemblies in which the two sexes vied with each other in
urbanity, friendly roguishness, and wit. It would require long antiquarian
researches to discover the origin and mode of playing many of these
pastimes, such as _des oes, des trois anes, des accords bigarres, du
jardin madame, de la fricade, du feiseau, de la mick_, and a number of
others which are named but not described in the records of the times. The
game _a l'oreille,_ the invention of which is attributed to the troubadour
Guillaume Adhemar, the _jeu des Valentines,_ or the game of lovers, and
the numerous games of forfeits, which have come down to us from the Courts
of Love of the Middle Ages, we find to be somewhat deprived of their
original simplicity in the way they are now played in country-houses in
the winter and at village festivals in the summer. But the Courts of Love
are no longer in existence gravely to superintend all these diversions
(Fig. 181).

Amongst the amusements which time has not obliterated, but which, on the
contrary, seem destined to be of longer duration than monuments of stone
and brass, we must name dancing, which was cert