powerful salons of Paris, which have reigned | from thenceforward in uninterrupted succession to the present day. The history of these salons, if some hand could be found delicate enough to write it, would be the history of the most real though occult influences which have regulated the destinies of France. But the course of reform never yet ran smooth; and the early part of the seventeenth century offered strange contrasts. There was a struggle between the license of the preceding age, and the general tendency which we have just pointed out; indeed, a hidden under-current of corruption may be said to have run through even the comparatively decorous reign of Louis XIV., to reappear under the Regency; as some diseases which seem to be extinct during a period of public health are, nevertheless, obscurely perpetuated in our hospitals, to burst forth with renewed virulence when circumstances favor their spread. Still the influence of improved taste was sure though slow, and when Mademoiselle d'Aubigné married about 1652-the century of corruption, of which Brantóme and Tallemant des Réaux have left the records, from Francis I. and his profligate successors, down to Louis XIII., had passed away-the ladies who wrote the six thousand love-letters that Bassompierre boasts of having burned on the eve of entering the Bastille, had grown old and steady; the novel of D'Urfe, L'Astrée, had introduced a new and sentimental passion in love; in a word, the reign of decorum, if not of virtue, had been inaugurated. Any sketch, however slight, of the society which met at the Hôtel Rambouillet, or of the coterie of the Précieuses, to which it gave birth, would draw us far beyond our limits. This is too attractive ground, and as we glance at the thick volumes lying on our table, we are reminded of the danger which attends such excursions. We will only say, that the Hôtel Rambouillet, linked with, though independent of, the court, was the first neutral ground where courtiers and authors met on equal terms. There might be seen all that was most illustrious in France, by birth, situation, or mind; the Princess of Condé and the Duchess of Longueville, the Duke of Enghien and the Prince de Conti, mingling familiarly with the wits of the day. During a period of about half a century, all the literary men of France, (those whose fame is now forgotten, as well as those whose fame will be immortal,) had figured there in turn, from old Malherbe, down to young Bossuet, who preached at the age of twelve. Some of these, not indeed the most illustrious, seemed to have used their newly acquired equality rather freely; and the Duke of Enghien is reported to have said of Voiture, the great favorite of this distinguished circle, and proportionably familiar and easy- 66 Indeed, if Voiture were of our condition he would be unbearable!" We have said, that it would be difficult within the limits of this article to follow M. de Noailles through all the subjects that he treats; and we should not even allude to his chapter on the Fronde, if it did not contain some of the best pages of his book. He traces a most able parallel between the aristocracy of France and that of England. The latter he represents as continually allied with the people against the encroachments of royalty; while the former, far more powerful at the outset, had to struggle against the continual though unavowed league of the sovereign and the nation, who considered the independent and oppressive nobles as a common adversary. Successive monarchs had prepared the subjugation of the French nobility which Louis XIV. accomplished. From thenceforward the aristocracy was definitively conquered, and politically annulled, for the benefit of all-powerful royalty. But if the French nobles failed in the political object which those of England attained, they, at least, cast by arms an immortal splendor on the history of their country, and, devoting themselves to war, undertook to die when required, for the defense or aggrandizement of France. "This military spirit was perpetuated in the French aristocracy, and became its distinctive feature. Ever ready to obey the first summons to arms; to leave all else for glory; and to ruin themselves for the service of the state, the French nobles have been the same even to the endwhether we see them by their intrepidity driving back the English at Fontenoy, or retiring, proud and contented, to their manors, with the cross of St. Louis and a threadbare doublet. But the sovereign and independent existence of the French aristocracy at its origin, gave it a position and importance which that of England had not. The Duc de Rohan, in his travels, was quite surprised at the inferior situation of the English nobles. They pay taxes,' he exclaims with surprise, and are not masters of their vassals as we are at home!' In France the aristocracy had a feeling of proud independence; a habit of patronage and clientship; a consciousness of superiority and privileges; and, above all, a certain grandeur of manners and a taste for perilous adventure, which make it stand out in bold relief on our annals, and whose last tumultuous effort expired at 6 the Fronde. The two countries we have compared had then both reached a critical period, and were both attaining almost at the same time the result of the long labor which had taken place in each in a contrary direction. But in the midst of the comedy which was going on here, we scarcely noticed the terrible tragedy which, under Charles I., was enacted at our very gates; and while England passed on to liberty with an austere brow, France threw herself smiling into the arms of despotism. The Fronde was, in fact, merely a last day granted to the ambition of the great nobles; from thenceforward all movement stops, all ambition becomes mute, all pretensions are relinquished; and, at a given signal, every one in silence takes his place behind the great king, to march in order in the stately procession, at whose head the imposing and magnificent monarch progresses through the age, to the admiration of his contemporaries and of posterity." Madame Scarron was not for some time to play any part in this sumptuous pageantry. When Scarron died, she was once more left to struggle with poverty, and would have been reduced to entire destitution, had not the interest of her friends obtained for her the continuation of her husband's pension on the queen-mother's private purse. She spent the first years of her widowhood in that same Ursuline convent in which she had been brought up; and on her slender income she always managed, says Mademoiselle d'Aumale, (who was the constant companion of her latter years,) "to live respectably, to be neatly shod, and to burn wax lights." She led a simple but not a retired life, and mixed much in conpany. We find her at the Hôtel d'Albret and the Hôtel Richelieu, two of the most important houses of the day, and much sought after in both. It appears to be at this time that she first began gradually to discard the mixed society (Ninon and others) that she had frequented as the wife of Scarron. But Fortune seemed determined to do her best to break down that proud spirit, or to ruffle the serenity of that self-possessed mind. The death of the queen-mother deprived Madame Scarron of all resources, and reduced her to the humiliating necessity of applying to friends. After many disappointments, she had at last made up her mind to accompany the Princess of Nemours, who was going to Portugal to marry Alphonso VI., king of that country. Strange to say, it was Madame de Montespan who interfered to prevent her departure, little dreaming that she was detaining her future rival. She herself undertook to present the widow Scarron's petition to the king; and whether it was that the hand that presented it made it more acceptable, or from respect to the queen-mother's memory, it is certain that it was immediately acceded to, and the pension continued by the king. From that time Madame de Montespan never entirely lost sight of the widow; and when, a few years later, a confidential person was required to educate the king's and her own illegitimate children, her choice fell on Madame Scarron. This latter only accepted the charge as concerning the king's children, and on condition that the offer should proceed from him, and not from Madame de Montespan. A singular scruple, which gives a good idea of the partial laws of morality time lost all shame; Monsieur de Montespan then existing! Louis XIV. had not at that was troublesome, and during three years Madame Scarron and her young charges lived mysteriously concealed in a magnificent house in one of the most retired quarters of Paris. The king often visited his children in secret; and the attractive conversation of their governess soon conquered the prejudice that he had at first conceived against her, and which made him ironically speak of her to Madame de Montespan as your bel-esprit." It was only at the latter end of 1673, that the three children of Madame de Montespan were legitimatized, presented to the queen, and definitely installed at court with their governess. Madame Scarron was then nearly forty. The courtiers, by an instinct of flattery, felt that the memory of Scarron should now be kept in the background; and when on one occasion the king styled her Madame de Maintenon, from the name of an estate which his bounty had enabled her to purchase, the fashion was immediately adopted; and the name of the poor poet ceased to startle the echoes of Versailles. It seemed as though the wish expressed in his epitaph had been fulfilled, and that he had been left to his first long night of repose.* From that time Madame de Maintenon's history is the history of the court, with all its intrigues and all its jealousies! She had taken on a chain which she was not to lay down until the death of Louis XIV. delivered her from her grandeur; she was to expiate the pride which had been the mainspring * Scarron wrote the following epitaph for himself: Passants, ne faites pas de bruit, Que le pauvre Scarron sommeille. of all her actions by ennui such as has rarely fallen to the lot of any human being. We shall not dwell on this part of her life; contemporary memoirs have made the jealous hauteur of Madame de Montespan, the transient reign of the fair Fontanges, and the steadily increasing favor of Madame de Maintenon, familiar as the gossip of the present day. We all fancy that we have seen the wilful and capricious Montespan driving her little filigree-coach round her splendid apartments of Versailles, and letting the six white mice which were harnessed to it nibble her fair hands. We do not think, besides, that M. de Noailles has well treated this part of his subject. A lighter hand than his-a feminine pen we should say would be required to trace those courtly quarrels which gave the Grand Monarque more trouble to appease than the government of all his dominions. Buonaparte, who had been admitted by an ordonnance of Louis XVI. after satisfactorily proving one hundred and forty years of noblesse. In the archives of the department of Seine-et-Oise at Versailles, may still be seen a letter full of bad spelling, signed "Buonaparte." In this letter the future emperor not only claims his sister, but also applies for the allowance of twenty sous per league, which was granted by the revolutionary government to all the pupils to allow them to regain their home. Mdlle. Buonaparte's home being far distant, at Ajaccio, entitled her to a sum of three hundred and fifty francs, which she accordingly received. Few persons will lay down these volumes without having conceived a more favorable opinion of Madame de Maintenon than any of her other historians had succeeded in creating; but we do not think that M. de Noailles has been equally successful in his apology of Louis XIV. His egotism, his self-adoration, stand out on every page; nor do we think that the Memoirs,* of which M. de Noailles has very satisfactorily proved the authenticity, are likely to give us a more favorable view of his character. Certain The king's marriage with Madame de Maintenon is no longer a subject of doubt in most minds, although no proofs of it are extant. We had hoped that M. de Noailles might have furnished us with new documents, but beyond giving some plausible reasons for fixing the date at 1685, instead of 1683, accord-passages are quoted that seem to have been ing to St. Simon, he has added nothing to written expressly to render us more lenient our stock of information. to the follies and delusions of our own time. For instance: It is at this crowning point, at this very summit of her elevation, that the author leaves his heroine, giving us the promise of another volume shortly. This, we suppose, will contain the history of the foundation of St. Cyr, and of the latter years of the remarkable woman whose life we have just sketched. As we take our leave of the age of Louis XIV. and write the word St. Cyr, we are reminded of the wish expressed by its charitable foundress, when, in remembrance of her own neglected childhood, she established that asylum for the indigent daughters of the nobility: "I wish," she said, that St. Cyr may last as long as France, and France as long as the world!" The world is there, and France, too, full of life, notwithstanding her revolutions; but St. Cyr is gone, and with it the monarchy of Louis XIV. When in 1793, all religious communities were dissolved, and the pupils and teachers of St. Cyr dispersed, there was one person there, and one only, who had known Louis XIV. and Madame de Maintenon. Her name was Madame de la Bastide. Among the pupils, too, there was a young girl named Marianne 66 "All that lies within the limits of our kingdom, of whatsoever nature it may be, belongs to us in the same degree, and should be equally valuable in our eyes. The monies in our private purse, the sums in the hands of our treasurers, and those we leave in circulation among our people, should all be husbanded with equal care." On another occasion he says to his son: "You must, first of all, be convinced, my son, that kings are absolute lords, and have naturally the free disposal of all the goods possessed by the clergy as well as by the laity, to use them at all times with economy; that is to say, for the general wants of the State." When we reflect that this same royal Communist was the man who said that he was the State-l'Etat, c'est moi !-we can form a fair estimate of those good old times. Ah, Monsieur le Duc ! maxims such as these would almost reconcile one to MM. Proudhon and Pierre Leroux! * Euvres de Louis XIV. Paris, 1806. From the Quarterly Review. LAYARD'S DISCOVERIES IN NINEVEH. Nineveh, and its Remains. By Austen Henry Layard, Esq., D.C.L. 2 vols. London. 1848. WE opened Mr. Layard's volumes, eager to resume our researches into the antiquities of those almost pre-historic cities, Nineveh and her vassals, which seem to have surrounded her on nearly every side; to assist in the disinterment of the palaces of the mythic Nimrod, Ninus, and Semiramis, which had perished from the face of the earth before the days of the later Hebrew prophets, and which, after a slumber of between two and three thousand years, are for the first time brought again to light in the nineteenth century. Our interest had been deepened by the sight of the few specimens of Mr. Layard's treasures which had then been placed in the British Musem; still more by the Khorsabad sculptures sent to Paris by Monsieur Botta. Till within the last two months only the smaller bas-reliefs from Nimroud had reached England. Since that time a second portion has arrived, including the black marble obelisk. These articles, by the negligence or unwarrantable curiosity (we are unwilling to use stronger terms) of persons at Bombay, have suffered considerable damage, though by no means to the extent represented in the public journals. Some of the smaller ones, particularly those of glass, having been carelessly repacked, were found broken to atoms; some, "including the most valuable specimens," (these are Mr. Layard's words,) were missing, it is to be hoped not purloined by some overtempted collector. Meantime the larger and more massive pieces are still reposing on the mud-beach of Bassora. We trust that, even in these economic days, means will be found to transport them immediately to England, with positive orders to treat them with greater respect at Bombay. These (the huge lion and bull) we expect to turn out by far the most remarkable and characteristic specimens of Assyrian art. We judge by those at Paris, where there are some, especially one colossal figure, which, though temporarily stowed away in a small room on the ground-floor in the Louvre, impressed us with a strange gigantic majesty, a daringness of conception, which was in no way debased by the barbaric rudeness of the execution, and on the other hand enhanced by its singular symbolic attributes. It is that kind of statue which it takes away one's breath to gaze on. We found, therefore, not without some slight feeling of disappointment, or rather of impatience, that although we were speedily to commence our operations in disinterring these mysterious palaces, we were to be interrupted by the negotiations, and intrigues, and difficulties, which embarrassed all Mr. Layard's proceedings; and then, before much had been accomplished, carried away to accompany Mr. Layard in excursions in the neighborhood, and indeed to some distance from the scene of his labors; we were to wander among the wild tribes of various manners, and still more various creeds, which people the districts to the west and northwest of the Tigris. But our impatience rapidly disappeared in such stirring and amusing companionship. We found in Mr. Layard not merely an industrious and persevering discoverer in this new field of antiquities, but an eastern traveller, distinguished we may say beyond almost all others, by the freshness, vigor, and simplicity of his narrative; by an extraordinary familiarity with the habits and manners of these wild tribes, which might seem almost intuitive, but is, we soon perceive, the result of long and intimate acquaintance, and perfect command of the language. No one has shown in an equal degree the power of adapting himself at once and completely, without surrendering the acknowledged superiority of the Frank, to the ordinary life of the Asiatic. Mr. Layard, without effort, teaches us more, and in a more light and picturesque manner, even than D'Arvieux; he seems as trustworthy, though far more lively and dramatic than Burckhardt. It is hardly too much to say that the history of the excavations and revelations, of his management of the Turkish rulers, of the wild chiefs whom the intelligence of his strange proceedings brought around him, of the laboring Arabs and Chaldeans whom he employed in his works, and the removal of the sculptures, with their embarkation on the Tigris, is as interesting as the discoveries themselves; while during the necessary suspension of his toil among the ruins, we are content to follow him into the villages of Mohammedans, Nestorian Christians, and Devil-worshippers, as if these were the sole or primary objects of his travels. Mr. Layard must excuse us if we acknowledge that he has irresistibly awakened our curiosity as to his own early history. How is it that a young Englishman has gained this peculiar power of ruling and wielding for his own purposes the intractable Asiatic mind; how has he learned to be firm and resolute, yielding and conciliatory, always at the right time; to be liberal where he should be, and to withhold his bounty when demanded by a powerful marauder under the civil name of a gift; to resist the temptation of courting mistimed or misplaced popularity, yet to attach to himself all whose attachment could be valuable or useful; to parry deceit by courteous phrases, to out-hyperbolize oriental flattery-without any of the meanness of falsehood; to show that he fully understood these trickeries of oriental adulation-without giving offense; quietly to maintain and to enforce respect for European, for English truth, honesty, and justice; to be the friend of the oppressed without being the declared enemy of the oppressor? All this implies a large experience, as well as a happy aptitude for assuming foreign habits; long usage as well as intuitive sagacity. We are inclined therefore to think that if Mr. Layard had chosen to begin the history of his adventures some time before the first notion of making researches on the Assyrian plains had dawned upon his mind (in 1839-40), at all events before he commenced his actual operations in 1845, he might have given us some features of Asiatic life in other quarters not less curious, original, and instructive than those which transpire in the course of his present proceedings. His papers on the sites of certain ancient cities in the Journal of the Geographical Society, show that he has travelled far and seen much beyond the course the Tigris; and passages in the present work occasionally betray that the wandering tribes now introduced to our knowledge are not the first with whom Mr. Layard has lived on intimate terms, with whom he has thrown off all but the open and honorable character of the Frank, and kept up that acknowledged intellectual superiority, which, when not insolently or arbitrarily proclaimed, is sure to meet with its proper homage. We read, for instance, (p. 89,) after the description of a large tribe breaking up when migrating to new pastures: "The scene caused in me feelings of melancholy, for it recalled many hours, perhaps unprofitably, though certainly happily spent; and many friends, some who now sighed in captivity for the joyous freedom which those wandering hordes enjoyed; others who had perished in its defense." In another place (p. 168) we find old habits, either of throwing the jerid, or of mingling in more serious frays, "making him forget his dignity, and join in this mimic war with his own attendants and some Kurdish horsemen." We notice these things as explaining as well as guarantying the truth, and so justifying our perfect reliance on the account of the mastery which Mr. Layard acquired over the Arab mind. These hours, if our readers are disposed to appreciate as highly as we do the value of his Assyrian discoveries, were not spent unprofitably, because, by the experience which they gave, by the skill thus acquired, Mr. Layard has been able to achieve what few Europeans under the same circumstances could have achieved; to persuade these unruly children of the desert to labor hard and with the utmost cheerfulness is his and our service, and all for their own good. He made them feel at once that they were engaged in the service of an employer, whose object was not wring the utmost toil out of their weary frames, and then wrest away the price of their labors; that it was his purpose, besides the fair payment of their wages, to promote in every manner their happiness and improvement. We must, however, wait patiently for whatever Mr. Layard may by and by be encouraged to give us of the details of his own earlier life in the East, content, meantime, with taking him up at the period to which these volumes distinctly refer. A former journey into the regions about the Tigris had awakened in his mind the strongest desire to make researches among the vast and mysterious mounds, those barrows, it might seem, of great cities, which rose in so |