green verdure and umbrageous trees, vocal with the songs of birds and redolent of the country odours of milky kine and newmown hay, separated Madame de Mazarin from the crowded streets of the busy city. "The fine air of Chelsea and the repose of solitude," he says in one of his notes to her, "leave no room to doubt either of your health or of the tranquillity of your mind." Madame, however, was no lover of solitude, and varied "the innocent diversions of the country" with town gossip and town amusements. The femmes savantes who formed the duchess's coterie, occasionally resolved themselves into a "school for scandal," and talked of the sayings and doings at Charles's masquerading Court, which reached them in this rus-in-urbe retreat without the emendations of the Court-newsman's abstract and brief chronicle; for, as yet, that functionary did not form part of the appanage of royalty, his office being filled, with more advantage to history if less to the edification of posterity, by Pepys, Evelyn, Clarendon, and Grammont. "Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it," like Tennyson's garden, manytongued Rumour must have borne to their cars what was being said at Whitehall on the marriage of the Prince of Orange to Lady Mary, the heiress-apparent to the crown of England (for the Duke of York had no male issue), and of the Prince's "sullenness and clownishness;" of the dangerous counsels of the Cabal ministry, then indulging in dreams of an impossible absolutism; of the bribery resorted to by Louis XIV. to further his ambitious schemes; of the quarrel between the two Houses of Parliament and between the Court and the city; the violent discontents prevailing throughout the nation; the efforts of Lauderdale to extinguish the embers of the late insurrection of the Covenanters in the north, and of plots and counter-plots brewing in the south-meal-tub plots and Rye-house plots, and plots with still more daring designs in embryo, and which brought the heads of peers and plebeians to the block. Nor were topics of lesser moment to the world at large, but of greater interest to female ears, quite forgotten, such as the opera and the latest fashions in patches and perukes. Conversation generally gave place to paillemaille on the lawn or basset in the boudoir; for the duchess was passionately addicted to gambling, then one of the dominant vices of a society that had few virtues to boast of. Play was followed by "the best repasts in the world," where one might see "everything that came from France for the delicate, and all that came from the Indies for the curious." In this way the aged Sybarite for the football of Time had by this measured many paces in his journey towards that bourne whence no traveller returns-dissipated the ennui of exile, and enjoyed, or persuaded himself he enjoyed, life with Epicurean relish; spending the summer season at Windsor when the Court was there, or at some country seat; sometimes wishing himself back in France, and at others felicitating himself at finding so much pleasure and enjoyment in England; moralizing in his serious, and trifling in his joyous moods-passing rapidly "from grave to gay, from lively to severe;" writing of what he calls love and gallantry to his younger friends, and entertaining their elders with sententious discourses on philosophy-a philosophy which has an avant gout of eighteenth century philosophism-stopping occasionally to register some moral reflection which looks as much out of place as a rare exotic would among docks and darnels; writing to Count d'Olonne, who had been banished from the French Court like himself for some political escape, about the pleasures of the table, in a strain that Brillat Savarin might have copied, and to the Duchess of Mazarin billets in which all the superlatives in the dictionary are exhausted in extolling her beauty; or, on more serious thoughts intent, inditing criticisms on ancient and modern authors, from the "morals" of Epicurus to the tragedies of Racine. Of his modus vivendi he gives a metrical sketch in a sonnet thus Englished: "Far from France my life I lead, The "little heav'n had lent" was reduced to less in 1685, when Charles II. died, and he lost his patron and his pension. Having declined the post of secretary to the Cabinet, tendered him by James II., and James's short but feverish reign having become matter of history, and the revolution of 1688 having converted the young princeling, whose acquaintance St. Evremond had casually made in Holland, into a king, the old courtier and essayist, over whose whitening hairs eighty-five winters had passed, still continucd to "go into society." But the narrow social orbit in which Dutch William moved, was not the gay, frivolous, pleasure-loving society that crowded Charles's levées, and threw the thin gauzy veil of wit and gallantry over vice and villainy, while it secretly laughed at public or private virtue. The dull decorum of the Stadtholder's lugubrious court, although its stiff funereal etiquette savoured somewhat of parvenu royalty, had the negative merit of inducing an apparently stricter regard for the externals of propriety, albeit it was at best but the equivocal homage that vice pays to virtue. But the new sovereign was a stranger to English manners and customs, and spoke the language "inelegantly and with effort;" his life and throne were assailed by conspiracies at home and abroad; and, distrustful of those around him, he sought relief from the cares and dangers of a sovereignty perilously insecure, in a small social circle "where hardly an English face was to be seen." Into this inner circle St. Evremond, being a foreigner, was admitted, and here he figured until, in 1689, he was sent word that he might return and would be well received at Versailles. The permission came too late; for a greater ruler of men than the Grand Monarque-more absolute than the most absolute of kings, and a greater leveller than the most democratic of democrats-was about to terminate his exile. In September, 1703, at the age of ninety years five months and twenty days, as Des Maizeaux with conscientious accuracy informs us, the old Court-wit who had passed so many years in courts and camps, and seen princes and lords by the score flourish and fade-who had seen, with perhaps something of regret and a touch of fellow-feeling, James II. pass into exile, and the successful adventurer who succeeded him, after a scarcely less troubled reign, laid beside his queen in the chapel reared by a Tudor monarch, while the sceptre again passed into the hands of a Stuart princess-who had nothing to bequeath the nation but his aged bones, was borne to his last resting-place amid the motley gathering of wits and warriors who cumber the hallowed ground once trodden by saints. A minnow among the tritons of the Augustan age of French literature, St. Evremond may be ranked among the minor wits, the dii minorum gentium of a period singularly prolific in men of the first order of genius. As an essayist he appears to have modelled his style somewhat on that of Montaigne, as a satirist on that of Rochefoucault, and, longo intervallo, to have followed the inimitable De Sévigné in cultivating letter-writing as one of the fine arts. But he never concentrated his faculties, too much wasted upon trivialities, upon what could be called a sustained effort, unless his historical treatises, which Roux-Ferrand* classes with those of Saint Réal and Vertot, who profited by the materials collected by Lipsius, Scaliger, Ducagne, Duchesne, Baluze, and Mabillon could be counted as such, and apparently with no more ambitious aim than to preserve an ephemeral reputation as a wit-then indispensable to the cultured man of fashion-varied gay life of a courtier and bon vivant in writing essays and other detached pieces, in which, to please his own or his friends' fancies, he threw together his thoughts on various subjects. His best essays are those on the genius of the Romans under the Republic; his critical comparisons of Cæsar and Alexander, of Seneca, Plutarch and Petronius, of Sallust and Tacitus; and his observations on the French historians, and on French, English, and Italian comedy. He wrote three comedies himself, one to satirize the French Academy, another to ridicule the French opera-although he was a great lover of music, having composed idyls, prologues, and other pieces sung at the Duchess of Mazarin's and another in imitation of Ben Johnson's "Sir Politic-would-be," in which he depicts certain types of different "Hist des Progres de la Civilisation in Europe," tome vi. p. 265. nationalities; but the slight estimation in which they were held is sufficiently indicated by their omission from the English edition of his works published in 1725. Des Maizeaux, who says he preserved to the last a lively imagination, solid judgment, and happy memory, has given us his portrait from the life in the dual character of a social philosopher condensing much worldly wisdom in terse epigrams and a Court-wit frittering much of his time away in frivolity and amusement, evolving from a brain in which healthier and better thoughts might have found a place, forced conceits and counterfeited passion. His writings are often marred by a too obvious leaning to the hideous epicurism of his age; yet, underneath this superficial stratum of opinions, the reflex of those stirring in the minds and exemplified in the conduct of the men around him, one comes occasionally upon a vein of pure ore, which shows that the mind that could grasp such things, and formulate them in appropriate language, had something better and purer at bottom than the dross that lay upon the "The ridicule he observed in mankind," says his biographer, "made him merry, and he loved to expose it by a fine pregnant raillery or by an ingenious irony." It was this that gave point and piquancy to his letters, which are, in the opinion of some critics-an opinion I do not at all share-among the best specimens of the epistolary style in French literature. We have his character also drawn by his own hand, in a letter to the Count de Grammont, in 1696; and his position in the world of letters has been defined by his contemporary, Dryden, who gives him credit for "not only a justness in his conceptions, which is the foundation of good writing, but also a purity of language and a beautiful turn of words so little understood by modern writers," besides a penetration which "generally dives into the very bottom of his authors, searches into the inmost recesses of their souls, and brings up with him those hidden treasures which had escaped the diligence of others." He pronounces his analysis of the character and actions of Alexander the Great "an admirable piece of criticism," and awards a qualified commendation to his observations on contemporary dramatists, which were marred by his using other men's eyes instead of his own, in determining the position of certain playwrights, "giving to some of our coarsest poets a reputation which they never had at home," and mitting those names into his own country," which Dryden says "will be forgotten by posterity in ours." "trans Parmentier and Kneller, by their enduring art, have preserved his strongly-marked features, so that those learned in the science of Lavater, who see, or fancy they can see, "the mind's construction in the face," can supply traits that may have been obliterated or overlooked in Des Maizeaux' pen-and-ink sketch of the old Court-wit's self-drawn portrait. Kneller, with a touch of the Court-painter's flattering pencil, has all but improved away the ugly protuberance between the eyes,* and rendered the satirical smile almost imperceptible; while Parmentier represents him as he appeared in 1701, when age had ploughed deep furrows in his visage, and there was little left for flattery. R. F. O'CONNOR. THE IRISH ANTIQUARY. Where forests waved by lonely lakes, Where heather decks the peat-moss now, Turned over by the labourer's spade, The dinted helm, the golden torque ; The cup of stone; the brooch of bronze; And silent lies the battle trump To me they have a magic voice; Did Essex prize this coin that bore How came to wild Hibernia's shores The rudely-fashioned, broken urn, Holds ashes of the dead; Honoured by some wild, warlike tribe, Whose very name has fled. Twenty years before his death, a wen grew between his eyebrows; but he was not otherwise ill-favoured, having "blue, sparkling eyes, a large forehead, handsome mouth, and an agreeable and ingenuous physiognomy." T |