of ancient Greece; the rest of the known world was then in a state of barbarism.

The second age is that of Cesar and Augustus, distinguished likewise by the names of Lucretius, Cicero, Titus Livius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Varro, and Vitruvius.

The third is that which followed the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II. Then a family of private citizens was seen to do that which the kings of Europe ought to have undertaken. The Medicis invited to Florence the learned, who had been driven out of Greece by the Turks.-This was the age of Italy's glory. The polite arts had already recovered a new life in that country; the Italians honoured them with the title of virtu, as the first Greeks had distinguished them by the name of wisdom. Every thing tended towards perfection; a Michael Angelo, a Raphael, a Titian, a Tasso, and an Ariosto, flourished. The art of engraving was invented; elegant architecture appeared again, as admirable as in the most triumphant ages of Rome; and the Gothic barbarism, which had disfigured Europe, in every kind of production, was driven from Italy, to make way for good taste.

The arts, always transplanted from Greece to Italy, found themselves in a favourable soil, where they instantly produced fruit. France, England, Germany, and Spain, aimed, in their turns, to gather these fruits; but either they could not live in those climates, or else they degenerated very fast.

Francis I. encouraged learned men, but such as were merely learned men: be had architects; but

he had no Michael Angelo, nor Palladio: he endeavoured in vain to establish schools for painting; the Italian masters whom he invited to France, raised no pupils there. Some epigrams and a few loose tales, made the whole of our poetry. Rabelais was the only prose writer in vogue, in the time of Henry II.

In a word, the Italians alone were in possession of every thing that was beautiful, excepting music, which was then but in a rude state; and experimental philosophy, which was every where equally unknown.

Lastly, the fourth age is that known by the name of the age of Louis XIV. and is perhaps that which approaches the nearest to perfection of all the four; enriched by the discoveries of the three former ones, it has done greater things, in certain kinds, than those three together. The arts, indeed, were not carried further than under the Medicis, Augustus, and Alexander; but human reason was in general more improved. In this age we first became acquainted with sound philo. sophy. It may truly be said, that from the last years of cardinal Richelieu's administration till those which followed the death of Louis XIV, there has happened such a general revolution in our arts, our genius, our manners, and even in our government, as will serve as an immortal mark to the true glory of our country. This happy influence has not been confined to France; it has communicated itself to England, where it has stirred up an emulation which that ingenious and deeply-learned nation stood in need of at that time; it has introduced taste into Germany, and the

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sciences into Russia; it has even re-animated Italy, which was languishing; and Europe is indebted for its politeness and spirit of society to the court of Louis XIV.

Before this time, the Italians called all the people on this side the Alps by the name of Barbarians. It must be owned that the French, in some degree, deserved this reproachful epithet. Our forefathers joined the romantic gallantry of the Moors with the Gothic rudeness. They had hardly any of the agreeable arts amongst them; which is a proof that the useful arts were likewise neglected: for, when once the things of use are carried to perfection, the transition is quickly made to the elegant and the agreeable; and it is not at all astonishing, that painting, sculpture, poetry, eloquence, and philosophy, should be in a manner unknown to a nation, who, though possessed of harbours on the western ocean and the Mediterranean sea, were without ships; and who, though fond of luxury to an excess, were hardly provided with the most common manufactures.

The Jews, the Genoese, the Venetians, the Portuguese, the Flemish, the Dutch, and the English, carried on, in their turns, the trade of France, which was ignorant even of the first principles of commerce. Louis XIII. at his accession to the crown, had not a single ship; the city of Paris contained not quite four hundred thousand men, and had not above four fine public edifices; the other cities of the kingdom resembled those pitiful villages which we see on the other side of the Loire. The nobility, who were all stationed in the country, in dungeons, surrounded with deep

ditches, oppressed the peasant who cultivated the land. The high roads were almost impassable; the towns were destitute of police: and the government had hardly any credit among foreign nations.

We must acknowledge, that, ever since the decline of the Carlovingian family, France had languished more or less in this infirm state, merely for want of the benefit of a good administration.

For a state to be powerful, the people must either enjoy a liberty founded on the laws, or the royal authority must be fixed beyond all opposition, In France, the people were slaves till the reign of Philip Augustus: the noblemen were tyrants till Lewis XI.; and the kings, always employed in maintaining the authority against their vassals, had neither leisure to think about the happiness of their subjects, nor the power of making them happy.

Lewis XI. did a great deal for the regal power, but nothing for the happiness or glory of the nation. Francis I. gave birth to trade, navigation, and all the arts; but he was too unfortunate to make them take root in the nation during his time, so that they all perished with him. Henry the Great was on the point of raising France from the calamities and barbarisms in which she had been plunged by thirty years of discord, when he was assassinated in his capital, in the midst of a people whom he had begun to make happy. The cardinal de Richelieu, busied in humbling the house of Austria, the Calvinists, and the grandees, did not enjoy a power sufficiently undisturbed to reform

the nation; but he had at least the honour of be ginning this happy work.

Thus, for the space of nine hundred years, our genius had been almost always restrained under a Gothic government, in the midst of divisions and civil wars; destitute of any laws or fixed customs; changing every second century a language which still continued rude and unformed. The nobles were without discipline, and strangers to every thing but war and idleness: the clergy lived in disorder and ignorance; and the common people without industry, and stupified in their wretched

ness.

The French had no share either in the great discoveries, or admirable inventions of other nations they have no title to the discoveries of printing, gunpowder, glasses, telescopes, the sector, compass, the air-pump, or the true system of the universe: they were making tournaments, while the Portuguese and Spaniards were discovering and conquering new countries from the east to the west of the known world. Charles V. had already scattered the treasures of Mexico over Europe, before the subjects of Francis I. had discovered the uncultivated country of Canada; but, by the little which the French did in the beginning of the sixteenth century, we may see what they are capable of when properly conducted.

Voltaire.