of Paris, cloyed with other pleasures, alive to all that was racy and new, welcomed the pungent doctrines, and played with them as children play with fire, thinking no danger; as time went on, even embraced them in a genuine spirit of hope and goodwill for humanity.  The Revolution began at the top,—­in the world of fashion, birth, and intellect,—­and propagated itself downwards.  “We walked on a carpet of flowers,” Count Segur afterwards said, “unconscious that it covered an abyss;” till the gulf yawned at last, and swallowed them.

Eastward, beyond the Rhine, lay the heterogeneous patchwork of the Holy Roman, or Germanic, Empire.  The sacred bonds that throughout the Middle Ages had held together its innumerable fragments, had lost their strength.  The Empire decayed as a whole; but not so the parts that composed it.  In the south the House of Austria reigned over a formidable assemblage of states; and in the north the House of Brandenburg, promoted to royalty half a century before, had raised Prussia into an importance far beyond her extent and population.  In her dissevered rags of territory lay the destinies of Germany.  It was the late King, that honest, thrifty, dogged, headstrong despot, Frederic William, who had made his kingdom what it was, trained it to the perfection of drill, and left it to his son, Frederic ii. the best engine of war in Europe.  Frederic himself had passed between the upper and nether millstones of paternal discipline.  Never did prince undergo such an apprenticeship.  His father set him to the work of an overseer, or steward, flung plates at his head in the family circle, thrashed him with his rattan in public, bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for trying to run away from it.  He came at last out of purgatory; and Europe felt him to her farthest bounds.  This bookish, philosophizing, verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first warrior of his time, and one of the first of all time.

Another power had lately risen on the European world.  Peter the Great, half hero, half savage, had roused the inert barbarism of Russia into a titanic life.  His daughter Elizabeth had succeeded to his throne,—­heiress of his sensuality, if not of his talents.

Over all the Continent the aspect of the times was the same.  Power had everywhere left the plains and the lower slopes, and gathered at the summits.  Popular life was at a stand.  No great idea stirred the nations to their depths.  The religious convulsions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were over, and the earthquake of the French Revolution had not begun.  At the middle of the eighteenth century the history of Europe turned on the balance of power; the observance of treaties; inheritance and succession; rivalries of sovereign houses struggling to win power or keep it, encroach on neighbors, or prevent neighbors from encroaching; bargains, intrigue, force, diplomacy, and the musket, in the interest not of peoples but