spoke of citizens only in the way of ridicule. Of THE PEOPLE, their wants, their pleasures, their interests, their sorrows, they knew little and cared less. The problems of social life, dark, sad and disturbing, never troubled them. They never perceived that the world was out of joint, or fancied they were born to set it right. They aspired to no political influence; the only politics with which they had any concern were those of Court intrigue the miserable strifes of personal ambition; the Government of the country was the business of the monarchthey did not aspire to share either his labours or his prerogative; practically to influence society, to modify or meddle with the destiny of nations, to put forth thoughts which should agitate, convulse, or re-organise the world, was a presumption which never visited them even in dreams. Their highest aim was to instruct, to amuse, to interest, to melt, to sway, the cultivated and the great.

The seventeenth century threw its shadows so far over the eighteenth, that it is not till about 1746 that the peculiar features which we are accustomed to consider as characteristic of the latter epoch began to be prominently developed. The change which then became manifest, and grew more and more marked till the outbreak of the Revolution, had, however, been gradually preparing. Its seeds were sown before the seventeenth century was ended. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantz had operated as a narcotic on the religious spirit and religious literature of France. All the vitality which had of late so distinguished it died out. The Gallican Church had gained a triumph as ruinous as the victories of Pyrrhus. She had silenced or exiled all her enemies and critics. But what was the result? Where after this period' (says Robert Hall) are we to look for her Fenelons and her Pascals, where for those bright 'monuments of piety and learning which were the glory of her better days? As for piety, she perceived that she had no 'occasion for it, when there was no lustre of Christian holiness * surrounding her; nor for learning, when there were no longer any opponents to confute, nor any controversies to maintain. She felt herself at liberty to become as ignorant, as secular, as irreligious as she pleased; and, amid the silence and darkness. she had created around her, she drew the curtains and retired to rest. She became more exclusive, more narrow, more oppressive as she became more unenlightened and unintelligent, till shrewd and reflecting minds could tolerate her irrationalities no longer; and Thought, thrust out from her gates with suspicion and dislike, inevitably took service with her rival. Philosophy, finding that religion would not own her or converse

with her, became irreligious, naturally, and in self-defence. Nor was this all. The writings of the exiled Protestants, now free from any terror or restraint, penetrated, though partially, into literary circles; and among the refugees was one whose wit and learning secured him a partial and attentive audience, and had a vast influence in stimulating the scepticism of the coming age. This was Bayle, the very incarnation of the spirit of placid, relentless, comfortable Doubt; to whom nothing was sacred, for whom nothing was certain; essentially a critic and a questioner; probably the only great thinker who ever breathed freely in an absolute vacuum of faith.

Another cause operated simultaneously to liberate men's minds from the trammels of authority. The respect, the enthusiasm, the sincere but servile loyalty with which the monarch had been long regarded, melted away under the disasters, the follies, and the scandals of his later years. The great Image which the Nation had set up and worshipped so devoutly was at length discovered to be made of clay,—and scarcely of finer clay than ordinary men. While young, gracious, imposing in demeanour, royal in his tastes, victorious in his wars, endowed and surrounded with everything that looked like greatness, it was easy for courtiers to fancy him omnipotent and infallible, and to transmit their fancy to the nation. But when success abroad, and wise policy at home, began alike to fail him; when he endeavoured to atone for the criminal and shameful license of his life by puerile austerities at least as shameful, and barbarous persecutions incalculably more criminal; when he exacted from those around him, who felt none of his compunction, his own rigid penances and his own formal asceticism, and prescribed a hypocritical and gloomy puritanism as the sole path to court favour among a keen-witted, laughing, mocking, pleasure-loving tribe,—the overstrained cord gave way; the sacred prestige of Royalty was gone; and power, ceasing to be venerated, soon ceased to be feared.

At the same time, a long reign of lavish luxury and splendour had done its work in other directions. Abuses of all descriptions crept into every branch of the Administration, and were rife and riotous in every hole and corner of the land. The state of matters became too scandalous and too notorious to be endured in silence by any in whom patriotism and a sense of justice were not utterly extinct; the profligacy, both political and personal, of the Regency, was such as to place the whole weight of public sympathy on the side of frondeurs, investigators, and reformers; and the same circumstances which stimulated as

saults on the excesses and vices of authority rendered such assaults comparatively safe.

All these causes combined to render the eighteenth century as nearly as possible the intellectual opposite of its predecessor. It was essentially an era of reaction, of doubt, of inquiry, of antagonism. Literary activity took a wider range; literary men addressed a wider audience; the circle of readers extended, till something like a public' began to be formed, and it became both the fashion and the interest of writers to address the public instead of the court. The wit and epigrammatic taste of the French aided this change. Royalty and religion, as they then exhibited themselves, offered too tempting subjects for stinging sarcasms and conversational brilliancy to be spared even by men belonging to the Government or the Church; those who profited by the malversations and administrative iniquities of the period were yet among the first to hold them up to ridicule; statesmen, generals, and nobles preferred to be considered men of wit and letters rather than men of quality; and, for the first time, literature became a puissance in France. Le gouverne'ment,' says Barante, qui régnait alors luttait avec faiblesse et 'irrésolution contre cette influence; mais comme la France ne devait à ce gouvernement ni gloire, ni puissance; comme les 'armes étaient sans éclat, la cour sans dignité, les mœurs sans 'pudeur, l'état sans lois, les défenseurs de la religion sans bonne foi,-l'opinion publique se tournait entièrement du côté d'une 'philosophie qui flattait tous les amours-propres, qui dégageait de tous les liens, et érigeait en systéme le mépris du pouvoir-qu'il était en effet difficile de respecter.' Intoxicated with power and adulation; excited more and more by the indefensible abuses and the grotesque anomalies which every fresh investigation brought to light; surprised, too, and delighted to find how easily what had once been so powerful yielded to their onslaught, and how astoundingly what had once been so sacred crumbled beneath their logic; goaded also by compassion for a down-trodden people and a zeal for the public good which, in some, was pure and sincere, in others, mingled with much alloy of baser sentiments, - they became daily more daring, aggressive, and indiscriminate; they aspired not only to govern society, but to reorganise it.

Hence, the literary spirit of this age is in a most marked degree practical, utilitarian, and analytic. Hasty pamphlets took the place of elaborated works, and poetry was discarded for philosophy. It is remarkable that the eighteenth century

VOL. CI. NO. CCV.

18th Siècle, Introd., p. 35.

H

produced no poet of eminence except Voltaire; and poetry was neither his especial forte, nor his principal title to renown; and much even of his poetry was didactic and polemical. The philosophy which prevailed was coarse, materialistic, and destructive-made for the special occasion - devoted to a special purpose. The reaction against despotism, which showed itself in literature as much as in life, was rather a hatred of restraint than a pure love of freedom: it cleared away many noxious and entangling weeds; but it grew no matured or wholesome fruit. It was the inspiration alike of Voltaire, of Montesquieu, of Rousseau; but in Montesquieu alone is it genuine, rational, and sober.

Literature itself, too, in becoming a means and not an end, lost its purity and completeness. It ceased to be an art, and was degraded into a weapon; and, as a natural consequence, style was far less regarded than of yore, for men do not sedulously polish swords which are needed for the rough prompt use of actual warfare. The productions of other nations began to be studied as well as their institutions; there was an intellectual as well as a material importation from abroad. Science, also, both the exact and economic sciences, attracted an unusual degree of attention; and the enterprise of the great Encyclopedia of itself showed how remarkable a change had come over the intellectual spirit of the age. The Encyclopedists it was who, with inferior weapons, and in a rougher, harsher, colder style, completed the work which their three far greater precursors had begun, and gave to the century its peculiar repute as an atheistic and destructive era.

'They made themselves a fearful monument,

The wreck of old opinions-things which grew
Breathed from the birth of time.

Assuredly it was not an era on the intellectual phenomena of
which the human mind can look back with either pride or
gratification. Its philosophy was shallow; its insight was
partial; its temper was cynical, bitter, and ungenial. Even in
its most beautiful productions, there was a pervading tone of
the meretricious and unsimple. But it was not without its
grand and redeeming features. It had a great work to do, and
it did it effectually. Its mission, though not one of the noblest
or most pleasing, was a necessary one.
Execution had to be
done upon things no longer worthy to live: Laissez passer la
'justice de Dieu.' And if that execution had been done all in
honour, and nought in hate,'-if a spirit of earnest faith,
instead of angry and reckless cynicism, had presided over and

hallowed the ordained sacrifice, we might have looked back to the officiators at that mighty hecatomb with reverence and gratitude, where now we can feel no warmer sentiment than a reluctant admiration, strangely chequered with disapproval and disgust.

În estimating the characteristics by which the French literature of the present age is distinguished from that of its predecessor, M. Vinet does not give us as much assistance as we could desire. His 'Etudes, mainly the substance of a course of lectures delivered at Lausanne in 1844 and 1846, are incomplete and fragmentary. The first volume is devoted to Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël; the second to the poets— Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, and Beranger; the third is little more than a collection of criticisms on a number of contemporary writers, none of them of more than second-rate eminence, and some absolutely obscure. It is difficult to divine the principle, if any, which guided the selection. Probably, however, for this Vinet is less to blame than his editors; for the publication is a posthumous one.

We are yet too close to the era we would judge, too much involved in its partialities, too agitated still by its wild storms and its crowded catastrophes, to be able fully or fairly to paint its intellectual portrait. A few of the more marked and abiding features are all that we can hope successfully to catch and delineate. And, first, we must observe that when we speak of the literature of the nineteenth century in France, we mean, with scarcely an exception, the second portion of that century -the interval from 1815 to 1848. During the iron but skilful despotism of Napoleon, there was scanty literary achievement, because there was no mental freedom: the whole period of the Empire produced only two celebrities in the arena of letters; and though these were unquestionably about the most brilliant and influential geniuses of the whole century, yet both wrote under persecution and in exile. They were in the age, but not of it. Of the thirty or forty authors whom M. Vinet enumerates as belonging to Napoleon's reign, two only in no degree bore its features or submitted to its impress; and these two alone have survived-Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand.

It was otherwise with science, especially with the exact sciences. These flourished under the Empire. Researches into nature occupied spirits that might otherwise have been turbulent and dangerous; they mooted no menacing or disturbing questions; the knowledge which they brought to light might even be made profitable to the purposes of conquest and oppression. Scientific men, therefore, were honoured, and science