212 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not seen liis wonderful prestige still potent in dominating tlie sickly 

 mind of Louis II of Bavaria? In his desire to copy his chosen 

 model Louis ruined himself in building palaces. In this folly he 

 showed discrimination. Louis XIV, when dying, may have ac- 

 cused himself of having indulged too great a love for building; but 

 his edifices, with their majestic grandeur and the opulence of their 

 decoration, gave that royal life a frame which had much to do with 

 the dazzling which all Europe experienced when in the presence 

 of le Boi Soleil. In order to recognize and experience, though 

 but for a moment, a little of the impression felt by all contempo- 

 raries, Versailles must be visited ; the apartments of the palace, the 

 terraces, and the alleys of the park must be traversed. Thus will 

 be thrown upon this historic figure a light far more brilliant and 

 true than could possibly be the result of learning by heart accounts 

 of all the campaigns of Turenne or Conde, or all the clauses of the 

 treaties of Kimegue and Ryswick. 



" The same may be said of the eighteenth century, of which 

 only an incomplete idea can be had without a knowledge of its art. 

 This century, to which Voltaire gave the note, seems to have had 

 no sentiment of poetry. Down to the time of Andre Chenier 

 everything called poetry was no more than rhymed prose. The 

 imagination, however, did not lose its rights. Like a stream which 

 changes its bed, it withdrew from literature to flow into the arts 

 of design. There it gives evidence of invention and of light and 

 spontaneous grace. Architects adopt plans of happy arrangement. 

 They employ forms of rare elegance both in the elements of con- 

 struction and in the ornaments which decorate them. Such sculp- 

 tors as Capperi and Houdon give to portraiture a marvelous inten- 

 sity of life, while the terra cottas of Clodion, with their fantastic 

 and voluptuous charm, recall the clay modelers of antiquity. Such 

 painters as Greuze, Lancret, and Boucher spread before the eyes 

 living idyls, while Watteau and Frangonard conjure dreams of 

 ideal Cytheras, of a chimerical paradise where reign eternal youth 

 and eternal desire. The politics of our kings and of our ministers 

 of the period is but a succession of faults and weaknesses. The 

 best concerted plans come to naught. The most brilliant victory 

 produces no useful results. If France, in spite of so many reverses, 

 still held her supremacy in Europe, she owed it to her writers and 

 to her artists." 



Perrot's arguments might be used with even greater force in 

 reference to those notions which have had no Comines, no Join- 

 ville, no Froissart, no Villehardouin, but the history of whose 

 civilization may be traced in monuments along the Rhine and the 

 Danube, the Ems and the Elbe. In the last part of the article 



