J. B.

The epistles and satires are among the best of their kind, the verse tales are in the same way admirable, and the epigrams, impromptus, and short miscellaneous poems generally are the ne plus ultra of verse which is not poetry. The Anglomania of the century extended into poetry, and the Seasons of Thomson set the example of a whole library of tedious descriptive verse, which in its turn revenged France upon England by producing or helping to produce English poems of the Darwin school. The first of these descriptive performances was the Saisons of Jean François de Saint-Lambert (1716-1803), identical in title with its model, but of infinitely inferior value. SaintLambert was followed by Jacques Delille (1738-1813) in Les Jardins, Antoine Marin le Mierre (1723-1793) in Les Fastes, and Jean Antoine Roucher ( 745-1794) in Les Mois. Indeed, everything that could be described was seized upon by these describers. Delille also translated the Georgics, and for a time was the greatest living poet of France, the title being only diswriter of the school of J. B. Rousseau, but not destitute of energy. The only other poets until Chénier who deserve notice are Nicolas Gilbert (1751-1780)—the French Chatterton, or perhaps rather the French Oldham, who died in a workhouse at twenty-nine after producing some vigorous satires and, at the point of death, an elegy of great beauty; Jacques Charles Louis Clinchaut de Malfilâtre (1732-1767), another short-lived poet whose "Ode to the Sun" has a certain stateliness; and Jean Baptiste Gresset (1709–1777), the author of Ver-Vert and of other poems of the lighter order, which are not far, if at all, below the level of Voltaire. André Chénier (1762-1794) stands Chénier. far apart from the art of his century, though the strong chain of custom, and his early death by the guillotine, prevented him from breaking finally through the restraints of its language and its versification. Chénier, half a Greek by blood, was wholly one in spirit and sentiment. The manner of his verses, the very air which surrounds them and which they diffuse, are different from those of the 18th century; and his poetry is probably the utmost that its language and versification could produce. To do more, the revolution which followed a generation after his death was required.

died out, and the devotion to physical science, to sociology, and to a kind of free-thinking optimism which was to inspire Voltaire and the Encyclopedists had not yet become fashionable. Fénelon and Malebranche still survived, but they were emphatically men of the last age, as was Massillon, though he lived till nearly the middle of the century. The characteristic literary figures of the opening years of the period are d'Aguesseau, Fontenelle, Saint-Simon, personages in many ways interesting and remarkable, but purely transitional in their characteristics. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) is, indeed, perhaps the most typical figure of the time. He was a dramatist, a moralist, a philosopher, physical and metaphysical, a critic, an historian, a poet and a satirist. The manner of his works is always easy and graceful, and their matter rarely contemptible. 18th-Century Poetry.-The dispiriting signs shown during the 17th century by French poetry proper received entire fulfilment in the following age. The two poets who were most prominent at the opening of the period were the abbé de Chaulieu (1639-puted by Escouchard le Brun (1729-1807), a lyrist and ode 1720) and the marquis de la Fare (1644-1712), poetical or rather versifying twins who are always quoted together. They were both men who lived to a great age, yet their characteristics are rather those of their later than of their earlier contemporaries. They derive on the one hand from the somewhat trifling school of Voiture, on the other from the Bacchic sect of Saint-Amant; and they succeed in uniting the inferior qualities of both with the cramped and impoverished though elegant style of which Fénelon had complained. Their compositions are as a rule lyrical, as lyrical poetry was understood after the days of Malherbe--that is to say, quatrains of the kind ridiculed by Molière, and Pindaric odes, which have been justly described as made up of alexandrines after the manner of Boileau cut up into shorter or longer lengths. They were followed, however, by the one poet who succeeded in producing something resembling poetry in this artificial style, J. B. Rousseau (1671-1741). Rousseau. Rousseau, who in some respects was nothing so little as a religious poet, was nevertheless strongly influenced, as Marot had been, by the Psalms of David. His Odes and his Cantates are perhaps less destitute of that spirit than the work of any other poet of the century excepting André Chénier. Rousseau was also an extremely successful epigrammatist, having in this respect, too, resemblances to Marot. Le Franc de Pompignan (1709-1784), to whom Voltaire's well-known sarcasms are not altogether just, and Louis Racine (1692-1763), who wrote pious and altogether forgotten poems, belonged to the same poetical school; though both the style and matter of Racine are strongly tinctured by his Port Royalist sympathies and education. Lighter verse was represented in the 18th century by the long-lived Saint-Aulaire (1643-1742), by Gentil Bernard (1710-1775), by the abbé (afterwards cardinal) de Bernis (1715-1794), by Claude Joseph Dorat (1734-1780), by Antoine Bertin (1752-1790) and by Evariste de Parny (1753-1814), the last the most vigorous, but all somewhat deserving the term applied to Dorat of ver luisant du Parnasse. The jovial traditions of Saint-Amant begat a similar school of anacreontic songsters, which, represented in turn by Charles François Panard (16741765), Charles Collé (1709–1783), Armand Gouffé (1775-1845), and Marc-Antoine-Madeleine Desaugiers (1772-1827), led directly to the best of all such writers, Béranger. To this class Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836) perhaps also belongs; though his most famous composition, the Marseillaise, is of a different stamp. Nor is the account of the light verse of the 18th century complete without reference to a long succession of fable writers, who, in an unbroken chain, connect La Fontaine in the 17th century with Viennet in the 19th. None of the links, however, of this chain, with the exception of Jean Pierre Florian (1759-1794) deserve much attention. The universal faculty of Voltaire (1694-1778) showed itself in his poetical productions no less than in his other works, and it is perhaps not least remarkable in verse. It is impossible nowadays to regard the Henriade as anything but a highly successful prize poem, but the burlesque epic of La Pucelle, discreditable as it may be from the moral point of view, is remarkable enough as literature.

Veltaire (poetry).

18th-Century Drama.-The results of the cultivation of dramatic poetry at this time were even less individually remarkable than those of the attention paid to poetry proper. Here again the astonishing power and literary aptitude of Voltaire gave value to his attempts in a style which, notwithstanding that it counts Racine among its practitioners, was none the less predestined to failure. Voltaire's own efforts in this kind are indisputably as successful as they could be. Foreigners usually prefer Mahomet and Zaïre to Bajazet and Mithridate, though there is no doubt that no work of Voltaire's comes up to Polyeucte and Rodogune, as certainly no single passage in any of his plays can approach the best passages of Cinna and Les Horaces. But the remaining tragic writers of the century, with the single exception of Crébillon père, are scarcely third-rate. C. Jolyot de Crébillon (1674-1762) himself had genius, and there are to be found in his work evidences of a spirit which had seemed to die away with Saint-Genest, and was hardly to revive until Hernani. Of the imitators of Racine and Voltaire, La Motte in Inês de Castro was not wholly unsuccessful. François Joseph de la Grange-Chancel (1677-1758) copied chiefly the worst side of the author of Britannicus, and Bernard Joseph Saurin (1706-1781) and Pierre-Laurent de Belloy (17271775) performed the same service for Voltaire. Le Mierre and La Harpe, mentioned and to be mentioned, were tragedians; but the Iphigénie en Tauride of Guimond de la Touche (1725-1760) deserves more special mention than anything of theirs. There was an infinity of tragic writers and tragic plays in this century, but hardly any others of them even deserve mention. The muse of comedy was decidedly more happy in her devotees. Molière was a far safer if a more difficult model than Racine, and the inexorable fashion which had bound down tragedy to a feeble imitation of Euripides did not similarly prescribe an undeviating adherence to Terence. Tragedy had never been, has scarcely been since, anything but an exotic in France; comedy was of the

|

18th-Century Fiction.-With prose fiction the case was altogether different. We have seen how the short tale of a few pages had already in the 16th century attained high if not the highest excellence; how at three different periods the fancy for long-winded prose narration developed itself in the prose rehandlings of the chivalric poems, in the Amadis romances, and in the portentous recitals of Gomberville and La Calprenède; how burlesques of these romances were produced from Rabelais to Scarron; and how at last Madame de Lafayette showed the way to something like the novel of the day. If we add the fairy story, of which Perrault and Madame d'Aulnoy were the chief practitioners, and a small class of miniature romances, of which Aucassin et Nicolette in the 13th, and the delightful Jehan de Paris (of the 15th or 16th, in which a king of England is patriotic-difficult to class, comes under this head as well as under any ally sacrificed) are good representatives, we shall have exhausted the list. The 18th century was quick to develop the system of the author of the Princesse de Clèves, but it did not abandon

not mention Pierre de Marivaux (1688–1763) in this connexion | of its fertility in ideas, its splendid breadth of view, and the as the equal of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), but merely as being in his way almost equally original and equally remote from any suspicion of school influence. He began with burlesque writing, and was also the author of several comedies, of which Les Fausses Confidences is the principal. But it is in prose fiction that he really excels. He may claim to have, at least in the opinion of his contemporaries, invented a style, though perhaps the term marivaudage, which was applied to it, has a not altogether complimentary connotation. He may claim also to have invented the novel without a purpose, which aims simply at amusement, and at the same time does not seek to attain that end by buffoonery or by satire. Gray's definition of happiness, "to lie on a sofa and read endless novels by Marivaux " (it is true that he added Crébillon), is well known, and the production of mere pastime by means more or less harmless has since become so well-recognized a function of the novelist that Marivaux, as one of the earliest to discharge it, deserves notice. The name, however, of Jean Jacques Rousseau is of far different importance. His two great works, the Nouvelle Heloise and Émile, are as far as possible from being perfect as novels. But no novels in the world have ever had such influence as these. To a great extent this influence was due mainly to their attractions as novels, imperfect though they may be in this character, but it was beyond dispute also owing to the doctrines which they contained, and which were exhibited in novel form.

Rousseau

Such are the principal developments of fiction during the century; but it is remarkable that, varied as they were, and excellent as was some of the work to which they gave rise, none of these schools was directly very fertile in results or successors. The period with which we shall next have to deal, that from the outbreak of the Revolution to the death of Louis XVIII., is curiously barren of fiction of any merit. It was not till English influence began again to assert itself in the later days of the Restoration that the prose romance began once more to be written.

18th-Century History.—It is not, however, in any of the departments of belles-lettres that the real eminence of the 18th century as a time of literary production in France consists. In all serious branches of study its accomplishments were, from a literary point of view, remarkable, uniting as it did an extraordinary power of popular and literary expression with an ardent spirit of inquiry, a great speculative ability, and even a far more considerable amount of laborious erudition than is generally supposed. The historical studies and results of 18th-century speculation in France are of especial and peculiar importance. There is no doubt that what is called the science of history dates from this time, and though the beginning of it is usually assigned to the Italian Vico, its complete indication may perhaps with equal or greater justice be claimed by the Frenchman Turgot. Before Turgot, however, there were great names in French historical writing, and perhaps the greatest of all is that of Charles Secondat de Montesquieu (1689-1755). The three principal works of this great writer are all historical and at the same time political in character. In the Lettres persanes he handled, with wit inferior to the wit of no other writer even in that witty age, the corruptions and dangers of contemporary morals and politics. The literary charm of this book-the plan of which was suggested by a work, the Amusements sérieux et comiques, of Dufresny (1648-1724), a comic writer not destitute of merit-is very great, and its plan was so popular as to lead to a thousand imitations, of which all, except those of Voltaire and Goldsmith, only bring out the immense superiority of the original. Few things could be more different from this lively and popular book than Montesquieu's next work, the Grandeur et décadence des Romains, in which the same acuteness and knowledge of human nature are united with considerable erudition,and with a weighty though perhaps somewhat grandiloquent and rhetorical style. His third and greatest work, the Esprit des lois, is again different both in style and character, and such defects as it has are as nothing when compared with the merits

felicity with which the author, in a manner unknown before,
recognizes the laws underlying complicated assemblages of fact.
The style of this great work is equal to its substance; less light
than that of the Lettres, less rhetorical than that of the Grandeur
des Romains, it is still a marvellous union of dignity and wit.
Around Montesquieu, partly before and partly after him, is
a group of philosophical or at least systematic historians, of
whom the chief are Jean Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742), and G.
Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785). Dubos, whose chief work is not
historical but aesthetic (Réflexions sur la poésie et la peinture),
wrote a so-called Histoire critique de l'établissement de la monarchie
française, which is as far as possible from being in the modern
sense critical, inasmuch as, in the teeth of history, and in order
to exalt the Tiers état, it pretends an amicable coalition of Franks
and Gauls, and not an irruption by the former. Mably (Observa-
tions sur l'histoire de la France) had a much greater influence
than either of these writers, and a decidedly mischievous one,
especially at the period of the Revolution. He, more than any
one else, is responsible for the ignorant and childish extolling
of Greek and Roman institutions, and the still more ignorant
depreciation of the middle ages, which was for a time character-
istic of French politicians. Montesquieu was, as we have said,
followed by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), whose
writings are few in number, and not remarkable for style, but
full of original thought. Turgot in his turn was followed by
Condorcet (1743-1794), whose tendency is somewhat more
sociological than directly historical. Towards the end of the
period, too, a considerable number of philosophical histories
were written, the usual object of which was, under cover of a kind
of allegory, to satirize and attack the existing institutions and
government of France. The most famous of these was the
Histoire des Indes, nominally written by the Abbé Guillaume
Thomas François Raynal (1713-1796), but really the joint work
of many members of the Philosophe party, especially Diderot.
Side by side with this really or nominally philosophical school
of history there existed another and less ambitious school, which
contented itself with the older and simpler view of the science.
The Abbé René de Vertot (1655-1735) belongs almost as much
to the 17th as to the 18th century; but his principal works,
especially the famous Histoire des Chevaliers de Malle, date from
the later period, as do also the Révolutions romaines. Vertot
is above all things a literary historian, and the well-known
"Mon siége est fait," whether true or not, certainly expresses
his system. Of the same school, though far more comprehensive,
was the laborious Charles Rollin (1661-1741), whose works in
the original, or translated and continued in the case of the
Histoire romaine by Jean Baptiste Louis Crévier (1693-1765),
were long the chief historical manuals of Europe. The president
Charles Jean François Hénault (1685-1770), and Louis Pierre
Anquetil (1723-1806) were praiseworthy writers, the first of
French history, the second of that and much else. In the same
class, too, far superior as is his literary power, must be ranked
the historical works of Voltaire, Charles XII, Pierre le Grand,
&c. A very perfect example of the historian who is literary
first of all is supplied by Claude Carloman de Rulhière (1735-
1791), whose Révolution en Russie en 1762 is one of the little
masterpieces of history, while his larger and posthumous work on
the last days of the Polish kingdom exhibits perhaps some of
the defects of this class of historians. Lastly must be mentioned
the memoirs and correspondence of the period, the materials
of history if not history itself. The century opened with the most
famous of all these, the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon
(1675-1755), an extraordinary series of pictures of the court
of Louis XIV. and the Regency, written in an unequal and
incorrect style, but with something of the irregular excellence
of the great 16th-century writers, and most striking in the sombre
bitterness of its tone. The subsequent and less remarkable
memoirs of the century are so numerous that it is almost impos-
sible to select a few for reference, and altogether impossible to
mention all. Of those bearing on public history the memoirs
of Madame de Staël (Mlle Delaunay) (1684-1750), of Pierre

Louis de Voyer, marquis d'Argenson (1694-1757), of Charles | little claim to their title. There were some who manifested, Pinot Duclos (1704-1772), of Stephanie Félicité de Saint-Aubin, however, an aptitude for purely philosophical argument, and one Madame de Genlis (1746-1830), of Pierre Victor de Bésenval who confined himself strictly thereto. Among these the most (1722-1791), of Madame Campan (1752–1822) and of the cardinal remarkable are Julien Offroy de la Mettrie (1709-1751) and de Bernis (1715-1794), may perhaps be selected for mention; Denis Diderot. La Mettrie in his works L'Homme machine, of those bearing on literary and private history, the memoirs L'Homme plante, &c., applied a lively and vigorous imagination, of Madame d'Épinay (1726-1783), those of Mathieu Marais a considerable familiarity with physics and medicine, and a (1664-1737) the so-called Mémoires secrets of Louis Petit de brilliant but unequal style, to the task of advocating materialistic Bachaumont (1690–1770), and the innumerable writings having ideas on the constitution of man. Diderot, in a series of early reference to Voltaire and to the Philosophe party generally. works, Lettre sur les aveugles, Promenade d'un sceptique, Pensées Here, too, may be mentioned a remarkable class of literature, philosophiques, &c., exhibited a good acquaintance with philoconsisting of purely private and almost confidential letters, sophical history and opinion, and gave sign in this direction, which were written at this time with very remarkable literary as in so many others, of a far-reaching intellect. As in almost all excellence. As specimens may be selected those of Mademoiselle his works, however, the value of the thought is extremely unequal, Aissé (1694-1757), which are models of easy and unaffected while the different pieces, always written in the hottest haste, tenderness, and those of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (1732-1776) and never duly matured or corrected, present but few the companion of Madame du Deffand and afterwards of specimens of finished and polished writing. Charles Bonnet d'Alembert. These latter, in their extraordinary fervour and❘ (1720-1793), a Swiss of Geneva, wrote a large number of works, passion, not merely contrast strongly with the generally languid many of which are purely scientific. Others, however, are more and frivolous gallantry of the age, but also constitute one of its psychological, and these, though advocating the materialistic most remarkable literary monuments. It has been said of them philosophy, generally in vogue, were remarkable for uniting that they "burn the paper," and the expression is not exagger- materialism with an honest adherence to Christianity. The ated. Madame du Deffand's (1697-1780) own letters, many of half mystical writer, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803) which were written to Horace Walpole, are noteworthy in a very also deserves notice. But the French metaphysician of the different way. Of lighter letters the charming correspondence century is undoubtedly Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac. of Diderot with Mademoiselle Voland deserves special mention. Condillac (1714-1780), almost the only writer of the But the correspondence, like the memoirs of this century, defies time in France who succeeded in keeping strictly to philosophy justice to be done to it in any cursory or limited mention. In without attempting to pursue his system to its results in ethics, this connexion, however, it may be well to mention some of the politics and theology. In the Traité des sensations, the Essai most remarkable works of the time, the Confessions, Rêveries, sur l'origine des connaissances humaines and other works and Promenades d'un solitaire of Rousseau. In these works, Condillac elaborated and continued the imperfect sensationalism especially in the Confessions, there is not merely exhibited of Locke. As his philosophical view, though perhaps more repassion as fervid though perhaps less unaffected than that of stricted, was far more direct, consecutive and uncompromising Mademoiselle de Lespinasse-there appear in them two literary than that of the Englishman, so his style greatly exceeded characteristics which, if not entirely novel, were for the first time Locke's in clearness and elegance and as a good medium of brought out deliberately by powers of the first order, were for the philosophical expression. first time made the mainspring of literary interest, and thereby set an example which for more than a century has been persistently followed, and which has produced some of the finest results of modern literature. The first of these was the elaborate and unsparing analysis and display of the motives, the weaknesses and the failings of individual character. This process, which Rousseau unflinchingly performed on himself, has been followed usually in respect to fictitious characters by his successors. The other novelty was the feeling for natural beauty and the elaborate description of it, the credit of which latter must, it has been agreed by all impartial critics, be assigned rather to Rousseau than to any other writer. His influence in this direction was, however, soon taken up and continued by Bernardin de SaintPierre, the connecting link between Rousseau and Chateaubriand, some of whose works have been already alluded to. In particular the author of Paul et Virginie set himself to develop the example of description which Rousseau had set, and his word-paintings, though less powerful than those of his model, are more abundant, more elaborate, and animated by a more amiable spirit.

18th-Century Philosophy.-The Anglomania which distinguished the time was nowhere more stongly shown than in the cast and direction of its philosophical speculations. As Montesquieu and Voltaire had imported into France a vivid theoretical admiration for the British constitution and for British theories in politics, so Voltaire, Diderot and a crowd of others popularized and continued in France the philosophical ideas of Hobbes and Locke and even Berkeley, the theological ideas of Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury and the English deists, and the physical discoveries of Newton. Descartes, Frenchman and genius as he was, and though his principles in physics and philosophy were long clung to in the schools, was completely abandoned by the more adventurous and progressive spirits. At no time indeed, owing to the confusion of thought and purpose to which we have already alluded, was the word philosophy used with greater looseness than at this time. Using it, as we have hitherto used it, in the sense of metaphysics, the majority of the Philosophes have very

18th-Century Theology.-To devote a section to the history of the theological literature of the 18th century in France may seem something of a contradiction; for, indeed, all or most of such literature was anti-theological. The magnificent list of names which the church had been able to claim on her side in the 17th century was exhausted before the end of the second quarter of the 18th with Massillon, and none came to fill their place. Very rarely has orthodoxy been so badly defended as at this time. The literary championship of the church was entirely in the hands of the Jesuits, and of a few disreputable literary freelances like Élie Fréron (1719-1776) and Pierre Francois Guyot, abbé Desfontaines (1685-1745). The Jesuits were learned enough, and their principal journal, that of Trévoux, was conducted with much vigour and a great deal of erudition. But they were in the first place discredited by the moral taint which has always hung over Jesuitism, and in the second place by the persecutions of the Jansenists and the Protestants, which were attributed to their influence. But one single work on the orthodox side has preserved the least reputation; while, on the other hand, the names of Père Nonotte (1711-1793) and several of his fellows have been enshrined unenviably in the imperishable ridicule of Voltaire, one only of whose adversaries, the abbé Antoine Guénée (17171803), was able to meet him in the Lettres de quelques Juifs with something like his own weapons. It has never been at all accurately decided how far what may be called the scoffing school of Voltaire represents a direct revolt against Christianity, and how far it was merely a kind of guerilla warfare against the clergy. It is positively certain that Voltaire was not an atheist, and that he did not approve of atheism. But his Dictionnaire philosophique, which is typical of a vast amount of contemporary and subsequent literature, consists of a heterogeneous assemblage of articles directed against various points of dogma and ritual and various characteristics of the sacred records. From the literary point of view, it is one of the most characteristic of all Voltaire's works, though it is perhaps not entirely his. The desultory arrangement, the light

Voltaire

(theology).

The

**System

Vauven ergues.

The works of Thomas chiefly took the form of academic éloges
or formal panegyrics, and they have all the defects, both in
manner and substance, which are associated with that style.
Of yet a third school, corresponding in form to La Rochefoucauld
and La Bruyère, and possessed of some of the antique vigour
of preceding centuries, was Luc de Clapiers, marquis de
Vauvenargues (1715-1747). This writer, who died
very young, has produced maxims and reflections
of considerable mental force and literary finish. From
Voltaire downwards it has been usual to compare him with
Pascal, from whom he is chiefly distinguished by a striking but
somewhat empty stoicism. Between the moralists, of whom we
have taken these three as examples, and the politicians may
be placed Rousseau, who in his novels and miscellaneous works
is of the first class, in his famous Contrat social of the second.
All his theories, whatever their originality and whatever their
value, were made novel and influential by the force of their
statement and the literary beauties of its form. Of direct and
avowed political writings there were few during the century, and
none of anything like the importance of the Contrat social,
theoretical acceptance of the established French constitution
being a point of necessity with all Frenchmen. Nevertheless
it may be said that almost the whole of the voluminous writings
of the Philosophes, even of those who, like Voltaire, were sincerely
aristocratic and monarchic in predilection, were of more or less
veiled political significance. There was one branch of political
writing, moreover, which could be indulged in without much fear.
Political economy and administrative theories received much
attention. The earliest writer of eminence on these subjects
was the great engineer Sébastien le Prestre, marquis de Vauban
(1633-1707), whose Oisivetés and Dime royale exhibit both great
ability and extensive observation. A more utopian economist
of the same time was Charles Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre
(1658-1743), not to be confounded with the author of Paul et
Virginie. Soon political economy in the hands of François
Quesnay(1694-1774) took a regular form, and towards the middle
of the century a great number of works on questions connected
with it, especially that of free trade in corn, on which Ferdinand
Galiani (1728-1787), André Morellet (1727-1819), both abbés,
and above all Turgot, distinguished themselves. Of writers on
legal subjects and of the legal profession, the century, though not
less fertile than in other directions, produced few or none of any
great importance from the literary point of view. The chief
name which in this connexion is known is that of Chancellor
Henri François d'Aguesseau (1668-1751), at the beginning of the
century, an estimable writer of the Port Royal school, who took
the orthodox side in the great disputes of the time, but failed
to display any great ability therein. He was, as became his
profession, more remarkable as an orator than a writer, and his
works contain valuable testimonies to the especially perturbed
and unquiet condition of his century-a disquiet which is perhaps
also its chief literary note. There were other French magistrates,
such as Montesquieu, Hénault (1685-1770), de Brosses (1706-
1773) and others, who made considerable mark in literature;
but it was usually (except in the case of Montesquieu) in subjects
not even indirectly connected with their profession. The Esprit
des lois stands alone; but as an example of work barristerial
in kind, famous partly for political reasons but of some real
literary merit, we may mention the Mémoire for Calas written by
J. B. J. Elie de Beaumont (1732-1786).

and lively style, the extensive but not always too accurate | votaries of noble sentiment to whom we have also alluded. erudition, and the somewhat captious and quibbling objections, are intensely Voltairian. But there is little seriousness about it, and certainly no kind of rancorous or deep-seated hostility. With many, however, of Voltaire's pupils and younger contemporaries the case was altered. They were distinctively atheists and anti-supernaturalists. The atheism of Diderot, unquestionably the greatest of them all, has been keenly debated; but in the case of Etienne Damilaville (1723-1768), Jacques André Naigeon (1738-1810), Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d'Holbach, and others there is no room for doubt. By these persons a great mass of atheistic and anti-Christian literature was composed and set afloat. The characteristic work of this school, its last word indeed, is the famous Système de la nature, attributed to Holbach (1723-1789), but known to be, of Nature." in part at least, the work of Diderot. In this remarkable work, which caps the climax of the metaphysical materialism or rather nihilism of the century, the atheistic position is clearly put. It made an immense sensation; and it so fluttered not merely the orthodox but the more moderate freethinkers, that Frederick of Prussia and Voltaire, perhaps the most singular pair of defenders that orthodoxy ever had, actually set themselves to refute it. Its style and argument are very unequal, as books written in collaboration are apt to be, and especially books in which Diderot, the paragon of inequality, had a band. But there is an almost entire absence of the heterogeneous assemblage of anecdotes, jokes good and bad, scraps of accurate or inaccurate physical science, and other incongruous matter with which the Philosophes were wont to stuff their works; and lastly, there is in the best passages a kind of sombre grandeur which recalls the manner as well as the matter of Lucretius. It is perhaps well to repeat, in the case of so notorious a book, that this criticism is of a purely literary and formal character; but there is little doubt that the literary merits of the work considerably assisted its didactic influence. As the Revolution approached, and the victory of the Philosophe party was declared, there appeared for a brief space a group of cynical and accomplished phrase-makers presenting some similarity to that of which, a hundred years before, Saint-Evremond was the most prominent figure. The chief of this group were Nicolas Chamfort (1747-1794) on the republican side, Chamfort. andAntoine Rivarol(1753-1801) on that of the royalists. Rivarol. Like the older writer to whom we have compared them, beither can be said to have produced any one work of eminence, and in this they stand distinguished from moralists like La Rochefoucauld. The floating sayings, however, which are attributed to them, or which occur here and there in their miscellaneous work, yield in no respect to those of the most famous of their predecessors in wit and a certain kind of wisdom, though they are frequently more personal than aphoristic. 18th-Century Moralists and Politicians.-Not the least part, however, of the energy of the period in thought and writing was devoted to questions of a directly moral and political kind. With regard to morality proper the favourite doctrine of the century was what is commonly called the selfish theory, the only one indeed which was suitable to the sensationalism of Condillac and the materialism of Holbach. The pattern book of this doctrine was the De l'esprit of Claude Adrien Helvétius Helvétius. (1715-1771), the most amusing book perhaps which ever pretended to the title of a solemn philosophical treatise. There is some analogy between the principles of this work and those of the Système de la nature. With the inconsistency- 18th-Century Criticism and Periodical Literature.-We have said some would say with the questionable honesty-which dis- that literary criticism assumes in this century a sufficient imtinguished the more famous members of the Philosophe party portance to be treated under a separate heading. Contributions when their disciples spoke with what they considered imprudent were made to it of many different kinds and from many different outspokenness, Voltaire and even Diderot attacked Helvétius points of view Periodical literature, the chief stimulus to its as the former afterwards attacked Holbach. But whatever may production, began more and more to come into favour. Even be the general value of De l'esprit, it is full of acuteness, though in the 17th century the Journal des savants, the Jesuit Journal Thomas that acuteness is as desultory and disjointed as its de Trévoux, and other publications had set the example of different style. As Helvétius may be taken as the represent-kinds of it. Just before the Revolution the Gazette de France was ative author of the cynical school, so perhaps Alexandre Gérard in the hands of J. B. A. Suard (1734-1817), a man who was Thomas (1732-1785) may be taken as representative of the nothing if not a literary critic. Perhaps, however, the most