oir. I wonder whether my
lady readers have ever attempted to realise how their sisters of two
hundred years ago spent their time? In an English country-house of
1650, there were no magazines, no newspapers, no lawn tennis or
croquet, no afternoon-teas or glee-concerts, no mothers' meetings or
zenana missions, no free social intercourse with neighbours, none of
the thousand and one agreeable diversions with which the life of a
modern girl is diversified. On the other hand, the ladies of the house
had their needlework to attend to, they had to "stitch in a clout," as
it was called; they had to attend to the duties of a housekeeper,
and, when the sun shone, they tended the garden. Perhaps they rode
or drove, in a stately fashion. But through long hours they sat over
their embroidery frames or mended the solemn old tapestries which
lined their walls, and during these sedate performances they required
a long-winded, polite, unexciting, stately book that might be read
aloud by turns. The heroic novel, as provided by Gombreville,
Calprenede, and Mlle. de Scudery supplied this want to perfection.

The sentiments in these novels were of the most elevated class, and
tedious as they seem nowadays to us, it was the sentiments, almost
more than the action, which fascinated contemporary opinion. Madame
de Sevigne herself, the brightest and wittiest of women, confessed
herself to be a fly in the spider's web of their attractions. "The
beauty of the sentiments," she writes, "the violence of the passions,
the grandeur of the events, and the miraculous success of their
redoubtable swords, all draw me on as though I were still a little
girl." In these modern days of success, we may still start to learn
that the Parisian publisher of _Le Grand Cyrus_ made 100,000 crowns
by that work, from the appearance of its first volume in 1649 to its
close in 1653. The qualities so admirably summed up by Madame de
Sevigne were those which appealed most directly to public feeling in
France. There really were heroes in that day, the age of chivalric
passions had not passed, great loves, great hates, great emotions of
all kinds, were conceivable and within personal experience. When La
Rochefoucauld wrote to Madame de Longueville the famous lines which
may be thus translated:

_To win that wonder of the world,
A smile from her bright eyes,
I fought my King, and would have hurled
The gods out of their skies_,

he was breathing the ver