There are to be found, even in grave history--amid the records of war, treaties, conquests, administrations and revolutions-- accounts given in equally grave language of deep questions of etiquette which seem to have been debated and settled with as much care and energy as the most serious questions of state affairs. Cases of this sort are announced and well founded. Whoever likes to see the extent to which attention was given to the subject can seek instances in the memoirs of public characters who lived in the seventeenth century, in the diaries of minute detailers like the Duke de St. Simon, Page to His Most Christian Majesty, Louis the Fourteenth; like Sir John Finett, Master of Ceremonies to Charles the First, and in the domestic histories of the courtiers and grandees of the Spanish and Venetian courts. Fortunately, the time has gone by when nice questions about trifling points of etiquette served to light the flame of civil war, as once they did in France, and to set the whole of the upper class in a kingdom in arms. We owe this, perhaps, as much to the general increase of civilization as to the working of any particular set of rules or system. But the principle which actuated the French nobility, at the time alluded to, is an inherent one in the human mind, and would be likely to repeat itself in some shape or another, not so violently perhaps, but still to repeat itself, were it not kept in check by the known laws of society. Mr. Buckle tells us that as late as the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, the right to sit in the presence of the French king "was considered to be a matter of such gravity that in comparison with it a mere struggle for liberty faded into insignificance." There was a perpetual striving which should be accounted greatest. According to the old code of etiquette, a duke's wife might sit in the French queen's presence, but no one under that rank could do so. A combination of marquises, counts, and other nobles was formed and wrung from the hand of Louis the Fourteenth, this concession that the ladies of the house of Bouillon might sit in the presence of the queen. But this was fuel to the fire of the combined noblemen's anger; two hostile parties were formed, and the question of etiquette was nearly being decided by the sword. It required all the tact and statesmanship of Mazarin to prevent this, and in the end the right was conceded to three of the most distinguished ladies of the lower aristocracy, to sit down in the presence of the queen. Upon this, the superior nobility summoned their adherents to Paris, and really a severe struggle followed, which ended in the last mentioned concession being revoked; and so great was the importance attached to the revocation that nothing would satisfy the nobles short of the public withdrawal being drawn up in a state paper, signed by the queen's regent, countersigned by the four secretaries of state, and conveyed to the assembly of nobles by four marshals of France.