ousted from the primacy of the German race, and its appeal has lain necessarily to aliens, to the Slav and the Magyar, the hereditary enemies of Teutonism. Does any force maintain the uneasy peace among these jarring races more strong than the feeling entertained by its subjects for that lineage, dignified as it has been by its distressful history?
A similar case is furnished by French history. The ascendency exercised by France from the age of Louis XIV. was due neither to her wealth, nor to her religion, nor even mainly to her military strength, formidable as it often was, but rather to the attraction of her civilisation. As Voltaire said in his History of Morals, it was then that Frenchmen began to render themselves generally acceptable by the grace and charm of their culture: "it was the dawn of good taste." At that date the role of Italy and Spain was over; Germany had not come on; and France filled the scene, enjoying for a time the combined authority which Rome exercised over Greece by her power, and which Greece exercised over Rome by her mind.
In this epoch she produced a literature so close to life that life and literature seemed one. Following on Montaigne, on Descartes, and on Malherbe, there arose a band of men who, numbering Corneille, Bossuet, La Fontaine, Boileau, Molière, and Racine among them, made France the school of Europe, and humanised humanity itself.
The magic of these masters seemed to transcend
