Voltaire's "History of the Age of Louis XIV.," was published when its author (see p. 259), long famous, was the companion of Frederick the Great in Prussia--from 1750 to 1753. Voltaire was in his twentieth year when the Grand Monarque died. Louis XIV. had succeeded his father at the age of five years, in 1643; his nominal reign covered seventy-one years, and throughout the fifty-three years which followed Mazarin's death his declaration "L'État c'est moi" had been politically and socially a truth. He controlled France with an absolute sway; under him she achieved a European ascendency without parallel save in the days of Napoleon. He sought to make her the dictator of Europe. But for William of Orange, Marlborough, and Eugene, he would have succeeded. Politically he did not achieve his aim; but under him France became the unchallenged leader of literary and artistic culture and taste, the universal criterion. _I.--France Under Mazarin_ We do not propose to write merely a life of Louis XIV.; our aim is a far wider one. It is to give posterity a picture, not of the actions of a single man, but of the spirit of the men of an age the most enlightened on record. Every period has produced its heroes and its politicians, every people has experienced revolutions; the histories of all are of nearly equal value to those who desire merely to store their memory with facts. But the thinker, and that still rarer person the man of taste, recognises only four epochs in the history of the world--those four fortunate ages in which the arts have been perfected: the great age of the Greeks, the age of Cæsar and of Augustus, the age which followed the fall of Constantinople, and the age of Louis XIV.; which last approached perfection more nearly than any of the others. On the death of Louis XIII., his queen, Anne of Austria, owed her acquisition of the regency to the Parlement of Paris. Anne was obliged to continue the war with Spain, in which the brilliant victories of the young Duc d'Enghein, known to fame as the Great Condé, brought him sudden glory and unprecedented prestige to the arms of France.