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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. SO far it has been contended that there was much to weigh against the worst that can be said of the eighteenth century, when the old-world civilization of Europe came, from internal corruption, to have its trunk of religious and hereditary prestige too hollow to be able to resist any heavy blow. But, like many a grand old tree with trunk no less hollow, the "old order" was still good for the flowering of one more season of Spring. For such was that most interesting period, which, commencing about the year 1770, was in France brought to an untimely end by the Revolution, but lasted in other countries till the direct or indirect consequences of so pregnant an event began to be much felt there. It is often called the period of Louis XVI., but might be still better associated with the more active and more fully representativepersonality of the most interesting queen of France since Blanche of Castille. Indeed one of the most surprising events in the history of mankind is the great and rapid, almost sudden, change which came over the privileged classes of Europe, just when they had got to their worst in the last years of Louis XV.'s reign, a change apparently connected with another no less startling in art. Though without any prejudice to the redeeming points of the period preceding it,âsuch as the urbanity, geniality, and polish of society, or the grace, elegance, and delicate finish of workmanship. On the contrary, the area where these obtained was now widened, notably in the case of our own country, which had sadly receded since Charles I. in real civilization, and where, under the two first Georges, the tone of the In the whole library of literature inspired no less by her charm in prosperity than by her saintly heroism in adversity, the Histoire /te Marie-Antoinette ...