the well-ordered phrases, diffuses an extraordinary splendour. When, in his Méditations sur l'Evangile or his Elévations sur les Mystères, Bossuet unrolls the narratives of the Bible or meditates upon the mysteries of his religion, his language takes on the colours of poetry and soars on the steady wings of an exalted imagination. In his famous Oraisons Funèbres the magnificent amplitude of his art finds its full expression. Death, and Life, and the majesty of God, and the transitoriness of human glory-upon such themes he speaks with an organ-voice which reminds an English reader of the greatest of his English contemporaries, Milton. The pompous, rolling, resounding sentences follow one another in a long solemnity, borne forward by a vast movement of eloquence which underlies, controls, and animates them all.

"Onuit désastreuse! O nuit effroyable, où retentit tout-à-coup comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt, Madame est morte!". .

-The splendid words flow out like a stream of lava, molten and glowing, and then fix themselves for ever in adamantine beauty.

We have already seen that one of the chief characteristics of French classicism was compactness. The tragedies of Racine are as closely knit as some lithe naked runner without an ounce of redundant flesh; the fables of La Fontaine are airy miracles of compression. In prose the same tendency is manifest, but to an even more marked degree. La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, writing the one at the beginning, the other towards the close, of the classical period, both practised the art of extreme brevity with astonishing X success. The DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD was the first French writer to understand completely the wonderful capacities for epigrammatic statement which his language possessed; and in the dexterous precision of pointed phrase no succeeding author has ever surpassed him. His little book of Maxims consists of about five hundred detached sentences, polished like jewels, and, like jewels, sparkling with an inner brilliance on which it seems impossible that one can gaze too long. The book was the work of years, and it contains in its small compass the observations of a lifetime. Though the reflections are not formally connected, a common spirit runs through them all. "Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!" such is the perpet

ual burden of La Rochefoucauld's doctrine: but it is vanity, not in the generalised sense of the Preacher, but in the ordinary personal sense of empty egotism and petty self-love which, in the eyes of this bitter moralist, is the ultimate essence of the human spirit and the secret spring of the world. The case is overstated, no doubt; but the strength of La Rochefoucauld's position can only be appreciated when one has felt for oneself the keen arrows of his wit. As one turns over his pages, the sentences strike into one with a deadly force of personal application; sometimes one almost blushes; one realises that these things are cruel, that they are humiliating, and that they are true. "Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui."-"Quelque bien qu'on nous dise de nous, on ne nous apprend rien de nouveau.'

"On croit quelquefois haïr la flatterie, mais on ne hait que la manière de flatter.” "Le refus de la louange est un désir d'être loué deux fois."-"Les passions les plus violentes nous laissent quelquefois du relâche, mais la vanité nous agite toujours.' No more powerful dissolvent for the self-complacency of humanity was ever composed.

Unlike the majority of the writers of his

age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work. In spite of the great labour which he spent upon perfecting it, he has managed, in some subtle way, to preserve all through it an air of slight disdain. "Yes, these sentences are all perfect," he seems to be saying; "but then, what else would you have? Unless one writes perfect sentences, why should one trouble to write?" In his opinion, “le vrai honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien;" and it is clear that he followed his own dictum. His attitude was eminently detached. Though what he says reveals so intensely personal a vision, he himself somehow remains impersonal. Beneath the flawless surface of his workmanship, the clever Duke eludes us. We can only see, as we peer into the recesses, an infinite ingenuity and a very bitter love of truth.

A richer art and a broader outlook upon life meet us in the pages of LA BRUYÈRE. The instrument is still the same-the witty and searching epigram-but it is no longer being played upon a single string. La Bruyère's style is extremely supple; he throws his apothegms into an infinite variety of moulds, employing a wide and coloured vocabulary, and a complete mastery of the art of rhetori

cal effect. Among these short reflections he has scattered a great number of somewhat lengthier portraits or character-studies, some altogether imaginary, others founded wholly or in part on well-known persons of the day. It is here that the great qualities of his style show themselves most clearly. Psychologi*cally, these studies are perhaps less valuable than has sometimes been supposed: they are caricatures rather than portraits-records of the idiosyncrasies of humanity rather than of humanity itself. What cannot be doubted for a moment is the supreme art with which they have been composed. The virtuosity of the language so solid and yet so brilliant, so varied and yet so pure-reminds one of the hard subtlety of a Greek gem. The rhythm is absolutely perfect, and, with its suspensions, its elaborations, its gradual crescendos, its unerring conclusions, seems to carry the sheer beauty of expressiveness to the farthest conceivable point. Take, as one instance out of a multitude, this description of the crank who devotes his existence to the production of tulips

"Vous le voyez planté et qui a pris racine au milieu de ses tulipes et devant la Solitaire; il ouvre de grands yeux, il