r the Ottoman hordes! The
fourth emperor since the birth of the same era bore sway over Germany!
Five czars, from Michael Romanoff to the Great Peter, had held, over
their enormous territory, the precarious tenure of their iron power!
Six kings had borne the painful cincture of the English crown;** two of
those kings had been fugitives to that court; to the son of the last it
was an asylum at that moment.

* Rigidly speaking, Corneille belongs to a period later than that
of Louis XIV., though he has been included in the era formed by that
reign.--ED.

** Besides Cromwell; namely, Charles I., Charles II., James II., William
and Mary, Anne, George I.

What wonderful changes had passed over the face of Europe during that
single reign! In England only, what a vast leap in the waste of events,
from the reign of the first Charles to that of George the First! I still
lingered, I still gazed, as these thoughts, linked to one another in
an electric chain, flashed over me! I still paused on the threshold of
those stately halls which Nature herself had been conquered to rear!
Where, through the whole earth, could I find so meet a symbol for the
character and the name which that sovereign would leave to posterity as
this palace itself afforded? A gorgeous monument of regal state raised
from a desert; crowded alike with empty pageantries and illustrious
names; a prodigy of elaborate artifice, grand in its whole effect, petty
in its small details; a solitary oblation to a splendid selfishness, and
most remarkable for the revenues which it exhausted and the poverty by
which it is surrounded!

Fleuri, with his usual urbanity--an urbanity that, on a great scale,
would have been benevolence--had hitherto indulged me in my emotions: he
now laid his hand upon my arm, and recalled me to myself. Before I could
apologize for my abstraction, the Bishop was accosted by an old man of
evident rank, but of a countenance more strikingly demonstrative of
the little cares of a mere courtier than any I ever beheld. "What news,
Monsieur le Marquis?" said Fleuri, smiling.

"Oh! the greatest imaginable! the King talks of receiving the Danish
minister on _Thursday_, which, you know, is his day of _domestic
business_! What _can_ this portend? Besides," and here the speaker's
voice lowered into a whisper, "I am told by the Duc de la Rochefoucauld
that the king intends, out of all ordinary rule and practice, to take
physic to-morrow: I can't beli