And this sense the Germans especially have. Finally, there is the
power of social life and manners. And even the Athenians themselves,
perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.
Voltaire, in a famous passage[462] where he extols the age of Louis the
Fourteenth and ranks it with the chief epochs in the civilization of our
race, has to specify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis the
Fourteenth, as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed on us its art
and literature, and the Italian Renascence its revival of art and
literature. And Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the gift
to name. It is not the sort of gift which we expect to see named. The
great gift of the age of Louis the Fourteenth to the world, says
Voltaire, was this: _l'esprit de societe_, the spirit of society, the
social spirit. And another French writer, looking for the good points in
the old French nobility, remarks that this at any rate is to be said in
their favor: they established a high and charming ideal of social
intercourse and manners, for a nation formed to profit by such an ideal,
and which has profited by it ever since.
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