people of Paris, and roused the suspicions of Anne of Austria,

whose favourite and minister, Mazarin, it was De Retz's great aim to supplant. Meanwhile, the contest between the court and the parliament was preparing the civil war of the Fronde. On the day of the Barricades, 16th August, 1648, he offered the queen-regent the employment of his influence with the people, but his offer was received with a sarcasm, and he ranged himself among the chiefs of the Fronde. Through that changeful and complicated struggle he played a leading part; and it is to his credit that he would never consent, for the sake of crushing his enemies, to ally himself with the Spaniards, the enemies of France. In 1651 the pope, to thwart Mazarin, made him a cardinal; it was thought advisable to come to terms with him. When he was no longer needed, however, and his intrigues began once more to cause alarm, he was arrested and imprisoned towards the close of 1652. Escaping to Spain, he went to Rome, and after the death of Mazarin (1661), was pardoned by Louis XIV., who employed him to advance the interest of French candidates in no fewer than four papal elections. He resigned his archbishopric, and, receiving compensation in other ways, was allowed to settle at Commercy. During his latter years he sold his estates, and honourably paid his debts. Induced by a lawsuit to visit Paris, the ancient chief of the Fronde was received with respect in the highest circles of the capital. Molière, Corneille, and Boileau did homage to him. He died in Paris on the 24th of August, 1679. Tallemant des Réaux describes this celebrated personage as "un petit homme noir, qui n'y voit que de fort près, mal fait et maladroit de ses mains en toute chose." In spite of his undeniable importance as a politician, De Retz would scarcely have retained his fame, had it not been for his inimitable Memoirs composed in the last years of his life, and the narrative contained in which extends to 1655. Of this work Sir James Stephen, no admirer of De Retz's personal character, says in his Lectures on the History of France, "So graphic and self-consistent are his innumerable portraits, and so carefully are they wrought out in all their minutest features, that the most exalted genius could not have produced them if they had not been close copies of living originals. With all his faults he places his readers in the very centre of that strange society, and throws a clear light on the character of every member of it, and on the nature of all the transactions in which they figure. The book is besides one of the best, as it is one of the earliest examples, of the force, the freedom, and the finesse of the French language." The best edition of the "Mémoires" is that of M. Aimé Champollion-Figeac, Paris, 1859, which contains some novel information respecting De Retz's later years.—F. E. RETZSCH, Moritz, an eminent German designer, was born at Dresden, December 9, 1779. He received his art-education in the academy of his native city; in good time established himself there as a portrait-painter, occupying his spare hours in the more congenial pursuit of painting subjects from the poets and historians; and his ability in this line was so far recognized that in 1824 he was appointed professor of painting in the Dresden academy. But out of Saxony Retzsch is never thought of as a painter. In England, as in Germany, he is regarded as the most original and the most intellectual designer in outline of his time: in other parts of Europe he is less understood, and necessarily less popular. The first of his remarkable series of etchings in outline (all oblong folio) was the illustrations to Göthe's Faust, a work at once accepted by his countrymen as the most perfect embodiment of the personages of their favourite poem. Retzsch afterwards added to the number of plates, and replaced some of the original designs by new ones—the last edition (1836) contains forty plates—but the original character was never lost; and it is a sufficient proof of the hold which the work has on the German mind, that when Faust is played, the characters are usually dressed and the groupings arranged from Retzsch's designs. The extraordinary popularity of the Faust led to his being applied to by the publishers for other illustrations of a similar kind. Accordingly he published in succession illustrations to Schiller's Song of the Bell, Fight with the Dragon, Friolin, Pegasus, &c., in all about eighty plates. Whilst these were in hand, appeared also similar illustrations to Leonore and others of Burger's Ballads, in all fifteen plates. In 1828 he published in a like style a series of Illustrations to Hamlet, in seventeen plates, of various excellence as illustrations of our great dramatist, but so original in character, thoughtful, and suggestive, as, in spite of their intensely Teutonic character, to acquire even in England wide and rapid appreciation. During the next seventeen years the Hamlet illustrations were followed by others of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, the Tempest, Othello, Merry Wives of Windsor, and Henry IV., in all upwards of a hundred plates. Neither of the succeeding series was, however, as popular in England as the Hamlet; and it must be admitted that with increasing years there was steady growth of mannerism and exaggeration. Besides these illustrations of great authors, Retzsch published various outline etchings of original subjects, which exhibited even more remarkably his depth and subtility of imagination and quaint fancy. Of these the "Chessplayers" (Satan playing with Man for his soul) is perhaps the finest, as it has been the most popular. The others are "The Fight of Light and Darkness;" "Fancies and Truths;" and posthumous sketches, published in 1858. Retzsch died June 15, 1857.—J. T—e. REUCHLIN, Johann, the famous scholar and reformer, was born at Pforzheim on the 28th of December, 1455. His parents belonged to the humbler ranks of life. The boy's sweet singing led to his being placed in the choir of the chapel of the margrave, who ultimately sent him with his own son to be educated at Paris. Latin and Greek occupied his time, Hermonymus of Sparta being his tutor in the latter language. In 1474 Reuchlin went to Basle and taught Latin and Greek himself, after a plan of his own, much simpler and more thorough than the current modes. After four years' residence at Basle he repaired to Orleans, and afterwards to Poitiers, to study law; and having at the latter place obtained the highest degree, he returned to Tübingen, practised as a lawyer, and married. Here he possessed the enlightened patronage of Prince Eberhard, who occasionally employed him in diplomatic correspondence. He enjoyed also at this period, both at Rome and in Florence, the society of many learned men, his mind opening and ripening under such benign intercourse. In 1482 we find him at Stuttgart, and two years afterwards he became an assessor of the supreme court. Hebrew had already occupied his attention, and the Emperor Frederick III. presented him with a Hebrew Bible, while his Jewish physician gave the aspiring philologer further tuition. But Prince Eberhard died, and his courtiers and counsellors were dismissed by his son and successor. Reuchlin retired to Heidelberg, and laboured with zeal, writing on law, translating Greek works, and forwarding in many ways the interests of the university. On another diplomatic visit to Rome in 1498, he received further Hebrew lessons, and astonished Argyropolus, the famous Greek teacher, by his exposition of a passage in Thucydides. A revolution having taken place at Wurtemberg he returned to Stuttgart—devoting himself to philological study, though often forced to take part in public business. Thus for about eleven years he was judge of the Suabian league. In 1509 Pfeffercorn, an apostate Jew of Cologne, and zealous against the religion of his fathers, had through the bigoted monks procured a decree from the Emperor Maximilian, that all Jewish books hostile to Christianity should be given up to the flames. The plan not succeeding, he petitioned to have the decree reissued with more exclusive severity; ordering all Jewish books to be at once destroyed. The emperor, not willing to go to such a length, appointed a commission to examine the whole question, and put Reuchlin upon it. As might have been anticipated, Reuchlin's decision was free, full, and liberal—wholly opposed to the employment of force in the support of religion, and therefore very unpalatable to the miserable and fanatical narrowness of the Dominicans. A controversy ensued; Pfeffercorn attacked Reuchlin in a bitter and venomous pamphlet, which he called "Handspiegel." Reuchlin replied by the publication of an Augen-spiegel (spectacles), following it up in 1512 by his "Klare Verstentnis." His foes selected out of those works Jewish propositions in the form of garbled extracts. He answered by a "Defensio." The dispute was referred to the pope, and the decision was in favour of Reuchlin; but Hochstraten, a Dutch inquisitor who had been enlisted in the service, still opposed him and prolonged the combat which was extending on all sides—a combat soon to ripen into the great battle of the Reformation. A large section of scholars espoused the cause of intellectual freedom, and the "Epistolæ obscurorum virorum," the most amusing and trenchant of satires, decided the victory.—(See Hutten.) In 1519 Reuchlin went for a season to Ingoldstat, and lectured with great popularity. He returned to Stuttgart in 1521, and settled for a brief space at Tübingen on the invitation of the university. His health failing, he came back once more to Stutt-