which, for tenderness, equanimity, cheerfulness, grace, sobriety, and hope, are not surpassed in prose literature. He well deserves, and shall have, a chapter of his own.

The best-known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far-reaching sentence so often, but none too often, quoted, that Great thoughts come from the heart.' And this is the truth that shines out as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the 'wide, grey, lampless depths ' of time. Those have been greatest in thought who have been best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort. And next to them come the great stern men, like Tacitus, Dante, Pascal, who, standing as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection of some of the moods of Shelley or Keats as from the savage fury of Swift, watch with a prophet's indignation the heedless waste of faculty and opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and paltry aim, as if we were the flies of a summer noon, which do more than any active malignity to distort the noble lines, and to weaken or to frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human nature. For practical purposes all these complaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson found the complaint that so large a space of the globe should be occupied by the uninhabitable ocean, encumbered by naked mountains, lost under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat or petrified by perpetual frost, and so small a space be left for the production of fruits, the pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of men.

When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the time that is absorbed in sleep, or appropriated to other demands of nature, or the inevitable requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn from us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly stolen from us by languor, we may realise of how small a portion of our time we are truly masters. And the same consideration of the ceaseless and natural preoccupations of men in the daily struggle will reconcile the wise man to all the disappointments, delays, shortcomings of the world, without shaking his own faith or his own purpose.

VAUVENARGUES.

ONE of the most important phases of French thought in the century of its illumination is only intelligible on condition that in studying it we keep constantly in mind the eloquence, force, and genius of Pascal. He was the greatest and most influential representative of that way of viewing human nature and its circumstances against which it was one of the glories of the eighteenth century to have rebelled. More than a hundred years after the publication of the Pensées, Condorcet thought it worth while to prepare a new edition of them, with annotations, protesting, not without a certain unwonted deference of tone, against Pascal's doctrine of the base and desperate estate of man. Voltaire also had them reprinted with notes of his own, written in the same spirit of vivacious deprecation, that we may be sure would have been even more vivacious, if Voltaire had not remembered that he was speaking in Pascal of the mightiest of all the enemies of the Jesuits. Apart from formal and specific dissents like these, all the writers who had drunk most deeply of the spirit of the eighteenth century, lived in a constant ferment of

revolt against the clear-witted and vigorous thinker of the century before, who had clothed theological mysteries with the force and importance of strongly entrenched propositions in a consistent philosophic scheme.

The resplendent fervour of Bossuet's declamations upon the nothingness of kings, the pitifulness of mortal aims, the crushing ever-ready grip of the hand of God upon the purpose and faculty of man, rather filled the mind with exaltation than really depressed or humiliated it. From Bossuet to Pascal is to pass from the solemn splendour of the church to the chill of the crypt. Besides, Bossuet's attitude was professional, in the first place, and it was purely theological, in the second; so the main stream of thought flowed away and aside from him. To Pascal it was felt necessary that there should be reply and vindication, whether in the shape of deliberate and published formulas, or in the reasoned convictions of the individual intelligence working privately. A syllabus of the radical articles of the French creed of the eighteenth century would consist largely of the contradictories of the main propositions of Pascal. The old theological idea of the fall was hard to endure, but the idea of the fall was clenched by such general laws of human nature as this, — that' necessarily mad, that it would be to be mad by a new form of madness not to be mad';—that man is nothing but masquerading, lying, and hypocrisy, both in what concerns himself and in respect of others,

men are so