a tragic passion "); and lastly the composition of long tirades | to moralizings and theological discussions on Jansenist principles, of smooth but monotonous verses, arranged in couplets tipped while Pierre Camus, bishop of Belley (1582-1652), in Palombe with delicately careful rhymes. Only Thomas Corneille (1625- and others, approached still nearer to the strictly religious story. 1709), the inheritor of an older tradition and of a great name, In the latter part of the century, the example of La Fontaine, deserves to be excepted from the condemnation to be passed on though he himself wrote in poetry, helped to recall the talethe lesser tragedians of this period. He was unfortunate in tellers of France to an occupation more worthy of them, more possessing his brother's name, and in being, like him, too volumin-suitable to the genius of the literature, and more likely to last. ous in his compositions; but Camma, Ariane, Le Comte d'Essex, are not tragedies to be despised. On the other hand, the names of Jean de Campistron (1656–1723) and Nicolas Pradon (1632-1698) mainly serve to point injurious comparisons; Joseph François Duché (1668-1704) and Antoine La Fosse (1653-1708) are of still less importance, and Quinault's tragedies are chiefly remarkable because he had the good sense to give up writing them and to take to opera. The general excellence of French comedy, on the other hand, was sufficiently vindicated. Besides the splendid sum of Molière's work, the two great tragedians had each, in Le Menteur and Les Plaideurs, set a capital example to their successors, which was fairly followed. David Augustin de Brueys (1640-1723) and Jean Palaprat (1650-1721) brought out once more the ever new Advocat Patelin besides the capital Grondeur already referred to. Quinault and Campistron wrote fair comedies. Florent Carton Dancourt (1661-1726), Charles Rivière Dufresny (c. 1654-1724), Edmond Boursault (1638-1701), were all comic writers of considerable merit. But the chief comic dramatist of the latter period of the 17th century was Jean François Regnard (1655-1709), whose Joueur and Legataire are comedies almost of the first rank. Heroic The reaction against the Clélie school produced first Madame de Villedieu (Catherine Desjardins) (1632-1692), a fluent and facile novelist, who enjoyed great but not enduring popularity. The form which the prose tale took at this period was that of the fairy story. Perrault (1628-1703) and Madame d'Aulnoy (d. 1705) composed specimens of this kind which have never ceased to be popular since. Hamilton (1646–1720), the author of the well-known Mémoires du comte de Gramont, wrote similar stories of extraordinary merit in style and ingenuity. There is yet a third class of prose writing which deserves to be mentioned. It also may probably be traced to Spanish influence, that is to say, to the picaresque romances which the 16th and 17th centuries produced in Spain in large numbers. The most remarkable example of this is the Roman comique of the burlesque writer Scarron. The Roman bourgeois of Antoine Furetière (1619-1688) also deserves mention as a collection of pictures of the life of the time, arranged in the most desultory manner, but drawn with great vividness, observation and skill. A remarkable writer who had great influence on Molière has also to be mentioned in this connexion rather than in any other. This is Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), who, besides composing doubtful comedies and 17th-Century Fiction.-In the department of literature which tragedies, writing political pamphlets, and exercising the task comes between poetry and prose, that of romance-writing, of literary criticism in objecting to Scarron's burlesques, produced the 17th century, excepting one remarkable develop-in his Histoires comiques des états et empires de la lune et du soleil, ment, was not very fertile. It devoted itself to so half romantic and half satirical compositions, in which some many new or changed forms of literature that it had no have seen the original of Gulliver's Travels, in which others have time to anticipate the modern novel. Yet at the beginning discovered only a not very successful imitation of Rabelais, of the century one very curious form of romance-writing was and which, without attempting to decide these questions, may diligently cultivated, and its popularity, for the time immense, fairly be ranked in the same class of fiction with the masterpieces prevented the introduction of any stronger style. It is remark- of Swift and Rabelais, though of course at an immense distance able that, as the first quarter of the 17th century was pre- below them. One other work, and in literary influence perhaps eminently the epoch of Spanish influence in France, the distinctive the most remarkable of its kind in the century, remains. Madame satire of Cervantes should have been less imitated than the de Lafayette, Marie de la Vergne (1634-1692), the friend of La models which Cervantes satirized. However this may be, the Rochefoucauld and of Madame de Sévigné, though she did not romances of 1600 to 1650 form a class of literature vast, isolated, exactly anticipate the modern novel, showed the way to it in and, perhaps, of all such classes of literature most utterly her stories, the principal of which are Zaide and still more La obsolete and extinct. Taste, affectation or antiquarian diligence Princesse de Clèves. The latter, though a long way from Manon have, at one time or another, restored to a just, and sometimes Lescaut, Clarissa, or Tom Jones, is a longer way still from Polexa more than just, measure of reputation most of the literary andre or the Arcadia. The novel becomes in it no longer a more relics of the past. Romances of chivalry, fabliaux, early drama, or less fictitious chronicle, but an attempt at least at the display Provençal poetry, prose chronicles, have all had, and deservedly, of character. La Princesse de Clèves has never been one of the their rehabilitators. But Polexandre and Cléopâtre, Clélie and works widely popular out of their own country, nor perhaps the Grand Cyrus, have been too heavy for all the industry and does it deserve such popularity, for it has more grace than energy of literary antiquarians. As we have already hinted, strength; but as an original effort in an important direction the nearest ancestry which can be found for them is the romances its historical value is considerable. But with this exception, of the Amadis type. But the Amedis, and in a less degree its the art of fictitious prose composition, except on a small scale, followers, although long, are long in virtue of incident. The is certainly not one in which the century excelled, nor are any romances of the Clélie type are long in virtue of interminable of the masterpieces which it produced to be ranked in this class. discourse, moralizing and description. Their manner is not unlike that of the Arcadia and the Euphues which preceded them in England; and they express in point of style the tendency which simultaneously manifested itself all over Europe at this period, and whose chief exponents were Gongora in Spain, Marini in Italy, and Lyly in England. Everybody knows the Carte de Tendre which originally appeared in Clélie, while most people have heard of the shepherds and shepherdesses who figure in the Astrée of Honoré D'Urfé (1568-1625), on the borders of the Lignon; but here general knowledge ends, and there is perhaps no reason why it should go much further. It is sufficient to say that Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701) principally devotes herself in the books above mentioned to laborious gallantry and heroism, La Calprénède (1610-1663) in Cassandre et Cléopâtre to something which might have been the historical novel if it had been constructed on a less preposterous scale, and Marin le Roy de Gomberville (1600-1647) in Polexandre 17th-Century Prose.-If, however, this was the case, it cannot be said that French prose as a whole was unproductive at this time. On the contrary, it was now, and only now, J. G. de that it attained the strength and perfection for which Balzac and it has been so long renowned, and which has perhaps, modern by a curious process of compensation, somewhat French deteriorated since the restoration of poetry proper prose. in France. The prose Malherbe of French literature was Jean Guez de Balzac (1594-1654). The writers of the 17th century had practically created the literary language of prose, but they had not created a prose style. The charm of Rabelais, of Amyot, of Montaigne, and of the numerous writers of tales and memoirs whom we have noticed, was a charm of exuberance, of naiveté, of picturesque effect-in short, of a mixture of poetry and prose, rather than of prose proper. Sixteenth-century French prose is a delightful instrument in the hands of men and women of genius, but in the hands of those who have not genius it is full of defects, and indeed is nearly unreadable. Now, prose is essentially an instrument of all work. The poet who has not genius had better not write at all; the prose writer often may and sometimes must dispense with this qualification. He has need, therefore, of a suitable machine to help him to perform his task, and this machine it is the glory of Balzac to have done more than any other person to create. He produced himself no great work, his principal writings being letters, a few discourses and dissertations, and a work entitled Le Socrate chrétien, a sort of treatise on political theology. But if the matter of his work is not of the first importance, its manner is of a very different value. Instead of the endless diffuseness of the preceding century, its ill-formed or rather unformed sentences, and its haphazard periods, we find clauses, sentences and paragraphs distinctly planned, shaped and balanced, a cadence introduced which is rhythmical but not metrical, and, in short, prose which is written knowingly instead of the prose which is unwittingly talked. It has been well said of him that he "écrit pour écrire "; and such a man, it is evident, if he does nothing else, sets a valuable example to those who write because they have something to say. Voiture seconded Balzac without much intending to do so. His prose style, also chiefly contained in letters, is lighter than that of his contemporary, and helped to gain for French prose the tradition of vivacity and sparkle which it has always possessed, as well as that of correctness and grace. 17th-Century History.-In historical composition, especially in the department of memoirs, this period was exceedingly rich. At last there was written, in French, an entire history of France. The author was François Eudes de Mézeray (1610-1683), whose work, though not exhibiting the perfection of style at which some of his contemporaries had already arrived, and though still more or less uncritical, yet deserves the title of history. The example was followed by a large number of writers, some of extended works, some of histories in part. Mézeray himself is said to have had a considerable share in the Histoire du roi Henri le grand by the archbishop Péréfixe (1605-1670); Louis Maimbourg (1610-1686) wrote histories of the Crusades and of the League; Paul Pellisson (1624-1693) gave a history of Louis XIV. and a more valuable Mémoire in defence of the superintendent Fouquet. Still later in the century, or at the beginning of the next, the Père d'Orléans (1644-1698) wrote a history of the revolutions of England, the Père Daniel (1649-1728), like d'Orléans a Jesuit, composed a lengthy history of France and a shorter one on the French military forces. Finally, at the end of the period, comes the great ecclesiastical history of Claude Fleury (16401723), a work which perhaps belongs more to the section of erudition than to that of history proper. Three small treatises, however, composed by different authors towards the middle part of the century, supply remarkable instances of prose style in its application to history. These are the Conjurations du comte de Fiesque, written by the famous Cardinal de Retz (1613-1679), the Conspiration de Walstein of Sarrasin, and the Conjuration des Espagnols contre Venise, composed in 1672 by the abbé de Saint-Réal (1639-1692), the author of various historical and critical works deserving less notice. These three works, whose similarity of subject and successive composition at short intervals leave little doubt that a certain amount of intentional rivalry animated the two later authors, are among the earliest and best examples of the monographs for which French, in point of grace of style and lucidity of exposition, has long been the most successful vehicle of expression among European languages. Among other writers of history, as distinguished from memoirs, need only be noticed Agrippa d'Aubigné, whose Histoire universelle closed his long and varied list of works, and Varillas (1624-1696), a historian chiefly remarkable for his extreme untrustworthiness. In point of memoirs and correspondence the period is hardly less fruitful than that which preceded it. The Régistres-Journaux of Pierre de l'Etoile (1540-1611) consist of a diary something of the Pepys character, kept for nearly forty years by a person in high official employment. The memoirs of Sully (1560-1641), published under a curious title too long to quote, date also from this time. Henri IV. himself has left a considerable correspondence, which is not destitute of literary merit, though not equal to the memoirs of his wife. What are commonly called Richelieu's Memoirs were probably written to his order; his Testament politique may be his own. Henri de Rohan (1579-1638) has not memoirs of the first value. Both this and earlier times found chronicle in the singular Historiettes of Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux (1619-1690), a collection of anecdotes, frequently scandalous, reaching from the times of Henri IV. to those of Louis XIV., to which may be joined the letters of Guy Patin (1602-1676). The early years of the latter monarch and the period of the Fronde had the cardinal de Retz himself, than whom no one was certainly better qualified for historian, not to mention a crowd of others, of whom we may mention Madame de Motteville (1621-1689), Jean Hérault de Gourville (1625-1703), Mademoiselle de Montpensier ("La Grande Mademoiselle ") (1627–1693), Conrart, Turenne and Mathieu Molé (1584-1663), François du Val, marquis de Fontenay-Mareuil (1594-1655), Arnauld d'Andilly (1588-1670). From this time memoirs and memoir writers were ever multiplying. The queen of them all is Madame de Sevigné (1626-1696), on whom, as on most of the great and better-known writers whom we have had and shall have to mention, it is impossible here to dwell at length. The last half of the century produced crowds of similar but inferior writers. The memoirs of Roger de Bussy-Rabutin (1618-1693) (author of a kind of scandalous chronicle called Histoire amoureuse des Gaules) and of Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719) perhaps deserve notice above the others. But this was in truth the style of composition in which the age most excelled. Memoirwriting became the occupation not so much of persons who made history, as was the case from Comines to Retz, as of those who, having culture, leisure and opportunity of observation, devoted themselves to the task of recording the deeds of others, and still more of regarding the incidents of the busy, splendid and cultivated if somewhat frivolous world of the court, in which, from the time of Louis XIV.'s majority, the political life of the nation and almost its whole history were centred. Many, if not most; of these writers were women, who thus founded the celebrity of the French lady for managing her mother-tongue, and justified by results the taste and tendencies of the bluestockings and précieuses of the Hôtel Rambouillet and similar coteries. The life which these writers saw before them furnished them with a subject to be handled with the minuteness and care to which they had been accustomed in the ponderous romances of the Clélie type, but also with the wit and terseness hereditary in France, and only temporarily absent in those ponderous compositions. The efforts of Balzac and the Academy supplied a suitable language and style, and the increasing tendency towards epigrammatic moralizing, which reached its acme in La Rochefoucauld (1663–1680) and La Bruyère (1639-1696), added in most cases point and attractiveness to their writings. 17th-Century Philosophers and Theologians.-To these moralists we might, perhaps, not inappropriately pass at once. But it seems better to consider first the philosophical and Descartes. theological developments of the age, which must share with its historical experiences and studies the credit of producing these writers. Philosophy proper, as we have already had occasion to remark, had hitherto made no use of the vulgar tongue. The 16th century had contributed a few vernacular treatises on logic, a considerable body of political and ethical writing, and a good deal of sceptical speculation of a more or less vague character, continued into our present epoch by such writers as François de la Mothe le Vayer (1588-1672), the last representative of the orthodox doubt of Montaigne and Charron. But in metaphysics proper it had not dabbled. The 17th century, on the contrary, was to produce in René Descartes (1 596-1650), at once a master of prose style, the greatest of French philosophers, and one of the greatest metaphysicians, not merely of France and of the 17th century, but of all countries and times. Even before Descartes there had been considerable and important developments of metaphysical speculation in France. The first eminent philosopher of French birth was Pierre Gassendi (1592– Male branche. Jan senists. Port Pascal. 1655). Gassendi devoted himself to the maintenance of a of its dramatic triumphs, all its greatest literary works, are almost modernized form of the Epicurean doctrines, but he wrote mainly, inextricably intermingled. Its earliest years, however, bear if not entirely, in Latin. Another sceptical philosopher of a less in theological matters rather the complexion of the scientific character was the physicist Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653), previous century. Du Perron and St Francis of Sales who, like many others of the philosophers of the time, was survived until nearly the end of its first quarter, and the accused of atheism. But as none of these could approach most remarkable works of the latter bear the dates of 1608 and Descartes in philosophical power and originality, so also none later. It was not, however, till some years had passed, till the has even a fraction of his importance in the history of French counter-Reformation had reconverted the largest and most literature. Descartes stands with Plato, and possibly Berkeley powerful portion of the Huguenot party, and till the influence of and Malebranche, at the head of all philosophers in respect of Jansenius and Descartes had time to work, that the extraordinary style; and in his case the excellence is far more remarkable outburst of Gallican theology, both in pulpit and in press, took than in others, inasmuch as he had absolutely no models, and place. The Jansenist controversy may perhaps be awarded the was forced in a great degree to create the language which he merit of provoking this, as far as writing was concerned. The used. The Discours de la méthode is not only one of the epoch- astonishing eloquence of contemporary pulpit oratory may be set making books of philosophy, it is also one of the epoch-making down partly to the zeal for conversion of which du Perron and books of French style. The tradition of his clear and perfect de Sales had given the example, partly to the same taste of the expression was taken up, not merely by his philosophical disciples, time which encouraged dramatic performances, for the sermon but also by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and the school of and the tirade have much in common. Jansenius himself, though Port Royal, who will be noticed presently. The very genius a Dutchman by birth, passed much time in France, and it was of the Cartesian philosophy was intimately connected with in France that he found most disciples. These disciples consisted this clearness, distinctness and severity of style; and there is in the first place of the members of the society of Port Royal something more than a fanciful contrast between these literary des Champs, a coterie after the fashion of the time, but one which characteristics of Descartes, on the one hand, and the elaborate devoted itself not to sonnets or madrigals but to devotional splendour of Bacon, the knotty and crabbed strength of Hobbes, exercises, study and the teaching of youth. This coterie early and the commonplace and almost vulgar slovenliness of Locke. adopted the Cartesian philosophy, and the Port Royal Of the followers of Descartes, putting aside the Port Royalists, Logic was the most remarkable popular hand-book by far the most distinguished, both in philosophy and in literature, of that school. In theology they adopted Jansenism, is Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). His Recherche and were in consequence soon at daggers drawn with the Jesuits, de la vérité, admirable as it is for its subtlety and its according to the polemical habits of the time. The most disconsecutiveness of thought, is equally admirable for tinguished champions on the Jansenist side were Jean Duvergier its elegance of style. Malebranche cannot indeed, like his great de Hauranne, abbé de St Cyran(1581-1643), and Antoine Arnauld master, claim absolute originality. But his excellence as a (1560-1619), but by far the most important literary results of the writer is as great as, if not greater than, that of Descartes, and the quarrel were the famous Provinciales of Pascal, or, to give them Recherche remains to this day the one philosophical treatise of their proper title, Lettres écrites à un provincial. great length and abstruseness which, merely as a book, is delight- Their literary importance consists, not merely in their ful to read-not like the works of Plato and Berkeley, because grace of style, but in the application to serious discussion of the of the adventitious graces of dialogue or description, but from peculiarly polished and quiet irony of which Pascal is the greatest the purity and grace of the language, and its admirable adjust-master the world has ever seen. Up to this time controversy had ment to the purposes of the argument. Yet, for all this, philo- usually been conducted either in the mere bludgeon fashion of sophy hardly flourished in France. It was too intimately the Scaligers and Saumaises-of which in the vernacular the connected with theological and ecclesiastical questions, and Jesuit François Garasse (1585-1631) had already contributed especially with Jansenism, to escape suspicion and persecution. remarkable examples to literary and moral controversy or else Descartes himself was for much of his life an exile in Holland in a dull and legal style, or lastly under an envelope of Rabelaisian and Sweden; and though the unquestionable orthodoxy of buffoonery such as survives to a considerable extent in the Malebranche, the strongly religious cast of his works, and the Salire Menippée. Pascal set the example of combining the use remoteness of the abstruse region in which he sojourned from of the most terribly effective weapons with good humour, good that of the controversies of the day, protected him, other followers breeding and a polished style. The example was largely of Descartes were not so fortunate. Holland, indeed, became followed, and the manner of Voltaire and his followers in the 18th a kind of city of refuge for students of philosophy, though even century owes at least as much to Pascal as their method and in Holland itself they were by no means entirely safe from matter do to Bayle. The Jansenists, attacked and persecuted by persecution. By far the most remarkable of French philosophical the civil power, which the Jesuits had contrived to interest, sojourners in the Netherlands was Pierre Bayle were finally suppressed. But the Provinciales had given them Bayle, (1647-1706), a name not perhaps of the first rank in an unapproachable superiority in matter of argument and respect of literary value, but certainly of the first as regards literature. Their other literary works were inferior, though still literary influence. Bayle, after oscillating between the two remarkable. Antoine Arnauld (the younger, often called "the confessions, nominally remained a Protestant in religion. In great ") (1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) managed philosophy he in the same manner oscillated between Descartes their native language with vigour if not exactly with grace. and Gassendi, finally resting in an equally nominal Cartesianism. They maintained their orthodoxy by writings, not merely against Bayle was, in fact, both in philosophy and in religion, merely the Jesuits, but also against the Protestants such as the Pera sceptic, with a scepticism at once like and unlike that of pétuité de la foi due to both, and the Apologie des Catholiques Montaigne, and differenced both by temperament and by circum-written by Arnauld alone. The latter, besides being responsible stance the scepticism of the mere student, exercised more or for a good deal of the Logic (L'Art de penser) to which we have less in all histories, sciences and philosophies, and intellectually alluded, wrote also much of a Grammaire générale composed unable or unwilling to take a side. His style is hardly to be called by the Port Royalists for the use of their pupils; but his principal good, being diffuse and often inelegant. But his great dictionary, devotion was to theology and theological polemics. To the latter though one of the most heterogeneous and unmethodical of Nicole also contributed Les Visionnaires, Les Imaginaires and compositions, exercised an enormous influence. It may be other works. The studious recluses of Port Royal also produced called the Bible of the 18th century, and contains in the germ a large quantity of miscellaneous literary work, to which full all the desultory philosophy, the ill-ordered scepticism, and the justice has been done in Sainte-Beuve's well-known volumes. critical but negatively critical acuteness of the Aufklärung. We have said that the philosophical, theological and moral tendencies of the century, which produced, with the exception 17th-Century Preachers.-When we think of Gallican theology during the 17th century, it is always with the famous pulpit orators of the period that thought is most busied. Nor is this unjust, for though the most prominent of them all, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) was remarkable as a writer of matter intended to be read, not merely as a speaker of matter intended to be heard, this double character is not possessed by most of the orthodox theologians of the time; and even Bossuet, great as is his genius, is more of a rhetorician than of a philosopher or a theologian. In no quarter was the advance of culture more remarkable in France than in the pulpit. We have already had occasion to notice the characteristics of French pulpit eloquence in the 15th and 16th centuries. Though this was very far from destitute of vigour and imagination, the political frenzy of the preachers, and the habit of introducing anecdotic buffoonery, spoilt the eloquence of Maillard and of Raulin, of Boucher and of Rose. The powerful use which the Reformed ministers made of the pulpit stirred up their rivals; the advance in science and classical study added weight and dignity to the matter of their discourses. The improvement of prose style and language provided them with a suitable instrument, and the growth of taste and refinement purged their sermons of grossness and buffoonery, of personal allusions, and even, as the monarchy became more absolute, of direct political purpose. The earliest examples of this improved style were given by St Francis de Sales and by Fenouillet, bishop of Marseilles (d. 1652); but it was not till the latter half of the century, when the troubles of the Fronde had completely subsided, and the church was established in the favour of Louis XIV., that the full &fflorescence of theological eloquence took place. There were at the time pulpit orators of considerable excellence in England, and perhaps Jeremy Taylor, assisted by the genius of the language, has wrought a vein more precious than any which the somewhat academic methods and limitations of the French teachers allowed them to reach. But no country has ever been able to show a more magnificent concourse of orators, sacred or profane, than that formed by Bossuet, Fénelon (1651-1715), Esprit Fléchier (1632-1710), Jules Mascaron (1634-1703), Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704), and Jean Baptiste Massillon (1663-1742), to whom may be justly added the Protestant divines, Jean Claude (1619-1687) and Jacques Saurin (1677-1730). Bossuet. The characteristics of all these were different. Bossuet, the earliest and certainly the greatest, was also the most universal. He was not merely a preacher; he was, as we have said, a controversialist, indeed somewhat too much of a controversialist, as his battle with Fénelon proved. He was a philosophical or at least a theological historian, and his Discours sur l'histoire universelle is equally remarkable from the point of view of theology, philosophy, history and literature. Turning to theological politics, he wrote his Politique tirée de l'ecriture sainte, to theology proper his Méditations sur les évangiles and his Elevations sur les mystères. But his principal work, after all, is his Oraisons funèbres. The funeral sermon was the special oratorical exercise of the time. Its subject and character invited the gorgeous if somewhat theatrical commonplaces, the display of historical knowledge and parallel, and the moralizing analogies, in which the age specially rejoiced. It must also be noticed, to the credit of the preachers, that such occasions gave them an opportunity, rarely neglected, of correcting the adulation which was but too frequently characteristic of the period. The spirit of these compositions is fairly reflected in the most famous and often quoted of their phrases, the opening " Mes frères, Dieu seul est grand" of Massillon's funeral discourse on Louis XIV.; and though panegyric is necessarily by no means absent, it is rarely carried beyond bounds. While Bossuet, made himself chiefly remarkable in his sermons, and in his writings by an almost Hebraic grandeur and rudeness, the more special characteristics of Christianity, largely alloyed with a Greek and Platonic spirit, displayed themselves in Fénelon. In pure literature he is not less remarkable than in theology, politics and morals. His practice in matters of style was admirable, as the universally known Télémaque sufficiently shows to those who know nothing else of his writing. But his taste, both in its correctness and its audacity, is perhaps more admirable still. Despite of Malherbe, Balzac, Boileau and the traditions Fénelon. of nearly a century, he dared to speak favourably of Ronsard, and plainly expressed his opinion that the practice of his own contemporaries and predecessors had cramped and impoverished the French language quite as much as they had polished or purified it. The other doctors whom we have mentioned were more purely theological than the accomplished archbishop of Cambray. Fléchier is somewhat more archaic in style than Bossuet or Fénelon, and he is also more definitely a rhetorician than either. Mascaron has the older fault of prodigal and somewhat indiscriminate erudition. But the two latest of the series, Bourdaloue and Massillon, had far the greatest repute in their own time purely as orators, and perhaps deserved this preference. The difference between the two repeated that between du Perron and de Sales. Bourdaloue's great forte was vigorous argument and unsparing denunciation, but he is said to have been lacking in the power of influencing and affecting his hearers. His attraction was purely intellectual, and it is reflected in his style, which is clear and forcible, but destitute of warmth and colour. Massillon, on the other hand, was remarkable for his pathos, and for his power of enlisting and influencing the sympathies of his hearers. Of minor preachers on the same side, Charles de la Rue, a Jesuit (1643-1725), and the Père Cheminais (1652-1680), according to a somewhat idle form of nomenclature, "the Racine of the pulpit," may be mentioned. The two Protestant ministers whom we have mentioned, though inferior to their rivals, yet deserve honourable mention among the ecclesiastical writers of the period. Claude engaged in a controversy with Bossuet, in which victory is claimed for the invincible eagle of Meaux. Saurin, by far the greater preacher of the two, long continued to occupy, and indeed still occupies, in the libraries of French Protestants, the position given to Bossuet and Massillon on the other side. 17th-Century Moralists.-It is not surprising that the works of Montaigne and Charron, with the immense popularity of the former, should have inclined the more thoughtful minds in France to moral reflection, especially as many other influences, both direct and indirect, contributed to produce the same result. The constant tendency of the refinements in French prose was towards clearness, succinctness and precision, the qualities most necessary in the moralist. The characteristics of the prevailing philosophy, that of Descartes, pointed in the same direction. It so happened, too, that the times were more favourable to the thinker and writer on ethical subjects than to the speculator in philosophy proper, in theology or in politics. Both the former subjects exposed their cultivators, as we have seen, to the suspicion of unorthodoxy; and to political speculation of any kind the rule of Richelieu, and still more that of Louis XIV., were in the highest degree unfavourable. No successors to Bodin and du Vair appeared; and even in the domain of legal writings, which comes nearest to that of politics, but few names of eminence are to be found. Only the name of Omer-Talon (1595-1652) really illustrates the legal annals of France at this period on the bench, and that of Olivier Patru (1604-1681) at the bar. Thus it happened that the interests of many different classes Pascal and pensée. of persons were concentrated upon moralizings, which writing. took indeed very different forms in the hands of Pascal and other grave and serious thinkers of the Jansenist complexion in theology, and in those of literary courtiers like Saint-Evremond (1613-1703) and La Rochefoucauld, whose chief object was to depict the motives and characters prominent in the brilliant and not altogether frivolous society in which they moved. Both classes, however, were more or less tempted by the cast of their thoughts and the genius of the language to adopt the tersest and most epigrammatic form of expression possible, and thus to originate the "pensée " in which, as its greatest later writer, Joubert, has said, "the ambition of the author is to put a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word." The great genius and admirable style of Pascal are certainly not less shown in his Pensées than in his Provinciales, though perhaps the literary form of the former is less strikingly supreme than that of the latter. The author is more dominated by his Saint La Rochefoucauld. subject and dominates it less. Nicole, a far inferior writer as well as thinker, has also left a considerable number of Pensées, which have about them something more of the essay and less of the aphorism. They are, however, though not comparable to Pascal, excellent in matter and style, and go far to justify Bayle in calling their author "l'une des plus belles plumes de l'Europe." In sharp contrast with these thinkers, who are invariably not merely respecters of religion but ardently and avowedly religious, who treat morality from the point of view of the Bible and the church, there arose side by side with them, or only a little later, a very different group of moralists, whose writings have been as widely read, and who have had as great a practical and literary influence as perhaps any other class of authors. The earliest to be born and the last to die of these was Charles de Saint-Denis, seigneur de saint-Evremond (16131703). Saint-Evremond was long known rather as a Evremond. Conversational wit, some of whose good things were handed about in manuscript, or surreptitiously printed in foreign lands, than as a writer, and this is still to a certain extent his reputation. He was at least as cynical as his still better known contemporary La Rochefoucauld, if not more so, and he had less intellectual force and less nobility of character. But his wit was very great, and he set the example of the brilliant societies of the next century. Many of Saint-Evremond's printed works are nominally works of literary criticism, but the moralizing spirit pervades all of them. No writer had a greater influence on Voltaire, and through Voltaire on the whole course of French literature after him. In direct literary value, however, no comparison can be made between SaintEvremond and the author of the Sentences et maximes morales. François, duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), has other literary claims besides those of this famous book. His Mémoires were very favourably judged by his contemporaries, and they are still held to deserve no little praise even among the numerous and excellent works of the kind which that age of memoir-writers produced. But while the Mémoires thus invite comparison, the Maximes et sentences stand alone. Even allowing that the mere publication of detached reflections in terse language was not absolutely new, it had never been carried, perhaps has never since been carried, to such a perfection. Beside La Rochefoucauld all other writers are diffuse, vacillating, unfinished, rough. Not only is there in him never a word too much, but there is never a word too little. The thought is always fully expressed, not compressed. Frequently as the metaphor of minting or stamping coin has been applied to the art of managing words, it has never been applied so appropriately as to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The form of them is almost beyond praise, and its excellencies, combined with their immense and enduring popularity, have had a very considerable share in influencing the character of subsequent French literature. Of hardly less importance in this respect, though of considerably less intellectual and literary individuality, was the translator of Theophrastus and the author of the Caractères, La Bruyère. Jean de la Bruyère (1645-1696), though frequently epigrammatic, did not aim at the same incredible terseness as the author of the Maximes. His plan did not, indeed, render it necessary. Both in England and in France there had been during the whole of the century a mania for character writing, both of the general and Theophrastic kind, and of the historical and personal order. The latter, of which our own Clarendon is perhaps the greatest master, abound in the French memoirs of the period. The former, of which the naïve sketches of Earle and Overbury are English examples, culminated in those of La Bruyère, which are not only light and easy in manner and matter, but also in style essentially amusing, though instructive as well. Both he and La Rochefoucauld had an enduring effect on the literature which followed them-an effect perhaps superior to that exercised by any other single work in French, except the Roman de la rose and the Essais of Montaigne. 17th-Century Savants.-Of the literature of the 17th century there only remains to be dealt with the section of those writers who devoted themselves to scientific pursuits or to antiquarian La Bruyère. erudition of one form or another. It was in this century that literary criticism of French and in French first began to be largely composed, and after this time we shall give it a separate heading. It was very far, however, from attaining the excellence or observing the form which it afterwards assumed. The institution of the Academy led to various linguistic works. One of the earliest of these was the Remarques of the Savoyard Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1595-1650), afterwards re-edited by Thomas Corneille. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy itself when it had as yet but a brief one. The famous Examen du Cid was an instance of the literary criticism of the time which was afterwards represented by René Rapin (1621–1687), Dominique Bouhours (1628–1702) and René de Bossu (1631-1680), while Adrien Baillet (1649-1706) has collected the largest thesaurus of the subject in his Jugemens des savants. Boileau set the example of treating such subjects in verse, and in the latter part of the century Reflexions, Discourses, Observations, and the like, on particular styles, literary forms and authors, became exceedingly numerous. In earlier years France possessed a numerous band of classical scholars of the first rank, such as Scaliger and Casaubon, who did not lack followers. But all or almost all this sort of work was done in Latin, so that it contributed little to French literature properly so-called, though the translations from the classics of Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (1606-1664) have always taken rank among the models of French style. On the other hand, mathematical studies were pursued by persons of far other and far greater genius, and, taking from this time forward a considerable position in education and literature in France, had much influence on both. The mathematical discoveries of Pascal and Descartes are well known. Of science proper, apart from mathematics, France did not produce many distinguished cultivators in this century. The philosophy of Descartes was not on the whole favourable to such investigations, which were in the next century to be pursued with ardour. tendencies found more congenial vent and are more thoroughly exemplified in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. This, of Italian origin, was mainly versy started in France by Charles Perrault (1628-1703), between who thereby rendered much less service to literature Ancients than by his charming fairy tales. The opposite side Moderns. was taken by Boileau, and the fight was afterwards revived by Antoine Houdar[d, t] de la Motte (1672–1731), a writer of little learning but much talent in various ways, and by the celebrated Madame Dacier, Anne Lefèvre (1654-1720). The discussion was conducted, as is well known, without very much knowledge or judgment among the disputants on the one side or on the other. But at this very time there were in France students and scholars of the most profound erudition. We have already mentioned Fleury and his ecclesiastical history. But Fleury is only the last and the most popular of a race of omnivorous and untiring scholars, whose labours have ever since, until the modern fashion of first-hand investigations came in, furnished the bulk of historical and scholarly references and quotations. To this century belong le Nain de Tillemont (16371698), whose enormous Histoire des empereurs and Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique served Gibbon and a hundred others as quarry; Charles Dufresne, seigneur de Ducange (1614-1688), whose well-known glossary was only one of numerous productions; Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), one of the most voluminous of the voluminous Benedictines; and Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741), chief of all authorities of the dry-as-dust kind on classical archaeology and art. Its Contro and Opening of the 18th Century.-The beginning of the 18th century is among the dead seasons of French literature. All the greatest men whose names had iHustrated the early reign of Louis XIV. in profane literature passed away long before him, and the last if the least of them, Boileau and Thomas Corneille, only survived into the very earliest years of the new age. The political and military disasters of the last years of the reign were accompanied by a state of things in society unfavourable to literary development. The devotion to pure literature and philosophy proper which Descartes and Corneille had inspired had |