[Illustration:  Fig. 181.—­Allegorical Scene of one of the Courts of Love in Provence—­In the First Compartment, the God of Love, Cupid, is sitting on the Stump of a Laurel-tree, wounding with his Darts those who do him homage, the Second Compartment represents the Love Vows of Men and Women.—­From the Cover of a Looking-glass, carved in Ivory, of the end of the Thirteenth Century.]

[Illustration:  The Chess-Players.

After a miniature of “The Three Ages of Man”, a ms. of the fifteenth century attributed to Estienne Porchier. (Bibl. of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.)

The scene is laid in one of the saloons of the castle of Plessis-les-Tours, the residence of Louis XI; in the player to the right, the features of the king are recognisable.]

If children had their games, which for many generations continued comparatively unchanged, so the dames and the young ladies had theirs, consisting of gallantry and politeness, which only disappeared with those harmless assemblies in which the two sexes vied with each other in urbanity, friendly roguishness, and wit.  It would require long antiquarian researches to discover the origin and mode of playing many of these pastimes, such as des oes, des trois anes, des accords bigarres, du jardin madame, de la fricade, du feiseau, de la mick, and a number of others which are named but not described in the records of the times.  The game a l’oreille, the invention of which is attributed to the troubadour Guillaume Adhemar, the jeu des Valentines, or the game of lovers, and the numerous games of forfeits, which have come down to us from the Courts of Love of the Middle Ages, we find to be somewhat deprived of their original simplicity in the way they are now played in country-houses in the winter and at village festivals in the summer.  But the Courts of Love are no longer in existence gravely to superintend all these diversions (Fig. 181).

Amongst the amusements which time has not obliterated, but which, on the contrary, seem destined to be of longer duration than monuments of stone and brass, we must name dancing, which was certainly one of the principal amusements of society, and which has come down to us through all religions, all customs, all people, and all ages, preserving at the same time much of its original character.  Dancing appears, at each period of the world’s history, to have been alternately religions and profane, lively and solemn, frivolous and severe.  Though dancing was as common an amusement formerly as it is now, there was this essential difference between the two periods, namely, that certain people, such as the Romans, were very fond of seeing dancing, but did not join in it themselves.  Tiberius drove the dancers out of Rome, and Domitian dismissed certain senators from their seats in the senate who had degraded themselves by dancing; and there seems to be no doubt that the Romans, from the conquest of Julius Caesar, did not