public. From a sentiment of gratitude to this portion of the public in particular, he has taken all possible pains to send forth this new edition with such improvements as his unceasing industry and care could suggest. Heidelberg, April 17, 1843. F. C. SCHLOsser. CONTENTS OF VOLUME III. Page i SECT. I.-Summary of the Political History of the Eighteenth SECT. II.-General Remarks upon the Political Circumstances and Relations of the different States of Europe at the begin- SECT. I.-Causes of the War.-Circumstances of the chief Powers SECT. III.-Treaties of Peace of Utrecht, Rastatt, Baden, and the Changes in the South-west of Europe connected with them 84 SECT. I.-Russia, Denmark, Saxony, Poland and Sweden, till the SECT. II.-Russia, Poland, Turkey, Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, till the Partition of the Provinces forcibly separated Page FROM THE ERECTION OF THE NEW RUSSIAN EMPIRE, AND FROM THE SECT. I.-New Governments in France, Spain and England; Cha- racter, Morals and First Steps of these Governments SECT. II.-England, France, Spain and Holland till the Treaty of Seville, and the Establishment of Don Carlos in Tuscany .... 248 SECT. III.-Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, Turkey, Austria, till the FROM THE DEATH OF FREDERICK WILLIAM I. TILL THE PEACE OF SECT. I.—Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and France till the Treaty of Nymphenburg, between Bavaria, France and Spain SECT. II.-Austrian War of Succession and first Silesian War, till SECT. IV.-Spain, France, England, Austria and Bavaria, till the HISTORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. INTRODUCTION. § I. SUMMARY OF THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. WITH respect to the political history, the author cannot follow its thread and connexion so far back as has been done in that of the literature of the eighteenth century to the borders of the middle ages. In the following sections he will very briefly delineate the condition of Europe at the end of the seventeenth century; first premising a hasty view of the eighteenth, in order to show the bearing of individual facts upon the general results. For the sake of distinctness of conception, the whole history of the century may be divided into four parts, and from the events of each a definite result be drawn. This may be done in the following manner :-In the first period France became great and powerful through the instrumentality of a system which oppressed the people, whilst the court and government were in full splendour. This system was soon received and imitated by all the European governments, even in those countries in which the form of the state was not military and monarchical, as was the case in most. An attention to ceremony and stiffness, and a love of frivolity and extravagance ruled in the courts, in which VOL. III. B principles were followed and announced in confidential circles that must necessarily prove destructive to the artificial social condition, and to the privileges of certain classes and castes, as soon as they passed over into the literature, and were spread from the courts among the people. Louis XIV. had reigned in this military-monarchical style, and fully carried out what Richelieu and Mazarin had commenced. He had humbled the aristocracy of the ecclesiastical nobles of the middle ages. He had formed the military discipline of the modern times so as to destroy the remnants of knighthood, and had favoured and promoted those arts and sciences which had no need of freedom or of inspiration for truth, and which at the same time were admirably calculated to administer to the splendour of the exalted and the vanity of the rich. Whilst the higher and middle classes in France, and soon after in the whole of Europe, where the French tone was universally aped, became more and more removed from the sound and honest training of the people, and set up entirely new pretensions and claims, a radical revolutionary and even democratic tendency began to prevail in the tone and fashionable reading of the same classes, together with the use of indecent and often shameless language. This revolution had been already prepared under the reign of Louis XIV. by Bayle, and a society of Parisian scoffers, among whom Voltaire shone when yet a boy, and it took place under the regency. It soon became quite impossible to maintain a system by force which was undermined even by those for whose advantage it was calculated. That boldness of thought and temerity of genius in the consideration of divine and human things, which it was necessary for every one to possess or affect who aimed at influencing society, shattered the foundations of the European states, so far as they were built upon christianmonarchical or aristocratic and hierarchical principles. What was commenced in the first period was completed in the second. States were universally to be maintained by force; and those who governed did not hesitate publicly to prefer subtility and corruption to morality and justice, when the former answered their purpose better than the latter. The new dynasty in England, as well as the Regent and his Dubois in France, did not shrink from the adoption of any immoral means which might promote their interests, and boasted of such conduct as genuine statesmanship. Hence a struggle arose in all states with prin |