The French nobles who throned in Hellas in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of Christendom knew nothing, or next to nothing, of the old-time glories of their home. The lions of Mycenæ told the occupants of Peloponnesus nothing of the king of men and his murderous queen, and the vengeance of Orestes leaping like a bright star to his aim. The chiefs in Attica viewed with indifferent eyes the masterpieces of antiquity still standing intact or almost blank of ravage upon the Attic plain and on the Attic hill. But the French lords of Peloponnesus and the French lords of Athens had a very liberal and deep affection for the civilization which they carried with them from their sweet land of France, and for those chivalrous institutions which made life one high delight to them. The best dream of the French gentlemen was to make the land of Greece as like the land of France as might be in all the grace and all the gayeties of life. To this end they lived in Attica as they lived in Languedoc, in Lacedæmon as in Limousin, and their greatest pleasure in their Hellenic empery was to make believe that they were in Paris or Provence. In the land where the Grecian gods had been hymned by Pindar, moulded by Phidias, painted by Apelles, and caricatured by Aristophanes, the adventurous French knights, who tricked themselves out with the titles of cities of Sparta and cities of Attica, bore to the golden land they governed all the pride and pomp and color that made their France so lovely in their eyes. They strove to make their lives as luxurious and as sumptuous as if they were kings of France and not lords of Grecian duchies, and they succeeded greatly in their purpose. French of Paris, French of Provence, French of Picardy, sang of love or commanded for battle in places where Socrates had died yesterday and Atreus the day before yesterday. All the parament of chivalry paraded, a riot of color and luxury, where Lycurgus had fed a strenuous people on bitter bread and brackish water, or played its games of mimic war and held its tribunals of fantastic love in the pale presence of the theatre of Dionysos.