1912] on the Efects of the Thirty Years' War. 391 



of the Thirty Years' War. After the Religious Wars of France 

 were at last over, the Court of Henry IV. is the seat of gallantry, 

 where tlie pursuit of pleasure is viewed as the principal object of 

 existence, but where, as is common in periods of reaction after 

 troubled and turliulent times, a love of refinement and desire for 

 restraint keeps at a distance the coarser forms of self-indulgence 

 After the assassination of the good King Henry, a new phase of 

 social form sets in and continues under the Spanish influence of 

 the consort of Louis XIII. A strict etiquette and a deferential 

 acceptance of religious formalism took the place of easier and 

 pleasanter ways, without a corresponding advance in the morality 

 which lies deeper — the earlier age of Louis XIV. was preparing 

 itself, till in its turn it was to be succeeded by another of still more 

 marked formality and decorum which lies beyond our present purview. 



The Palatine Court, as was natural from its local situation, was 

 most directly open to French influence ; the University numbered 

 several French scholars among its teachers, and the electoral palace 

 itself, Heidelberg Castle, was renovated by architects in the French 

 style. It was here that the young Electress Elizabeth, the grand- 

 daughter of Mary Stewart, was received not long before the War with 

 French allegorical ceremonial, and with French words of welcome. 

 The Court of Hesse-Cassel, second only to the Palatine in political 

 importance as upholding the " system " of the French alliance, was 

 hardly less deeply imbued with French tastes and ways of life. 

 Landgrave Maurice, one of the most far-sighted politicians of his 

 time, was a resolute reformer of manners on the French model, and 

 (in accordance with the change from grosser times) was the founder 

 of a temperance society. In other Courts of the South-west — even 

 in Bavaria — French influence asserted itself in spite of politics ; in 

 the North less so, with the exception of Anhalt (the home of Prince 

 Christian, the life and soul of the Calvinist French alliance) and at 

 a rather later date the Brunswick Courts, which bequeathed at least 

 the preference for French speech to our first two Georges. Of all 

 the German Courts that least open to French inroads upon old- 

 accustomed forms and half-media3val ways of life was the strictly 

 Lutheran court of Dresden, which less than a century later was to 

 outrun all others in its exaggeration of the gallantries of France. 



There may have been something left-handed in such a compli- 

 ment as that which Henry IV. paid to Count Dohna, a member of a 

 family of celebrated diplomatists, and himself a German nobleman of 

 a new school, when he presented him to the Queen with the question, 

 "Ze voUa — Je prendriez-voiis pour un Allemand?'" But the anecdote 

 supports the view that the Germans — a nation which in the middle 

 ages had presented themselves in their poetic literature as types of a 

 refined courtly way of thought and conduct — were not wholly losers 

 by the operation of influences without which it would not have been 

 easv to reform from within. Grohianus was worth extirpating quo- 



