hat every page contained a cutting indictment of their
system of government; and they adopted their usual method in such a
case. The sale of the book was absolutely prohibited throughout France,
and a copy of it solemnly burnt by the common hangman.

It was only gradually that the new views, of which Montesquieu and
Voltaire were the principal exponents, spread their way among the
public; and during the first half of the century many writers remained
quite unaffected by them. Two of these--resembling each other in this
fact alone, that they stood altogether outside the movement of
contemporary thought--deserve our special attention.

The mantle of Racine was generally supposed to have fallen on to the
shoulders of Voltaire--it had not: if it had fallen on to anyone's
shoulders it was on to those of MARIVAUX. No doubt it had become
diminished in the transit. Marivaux was not a great tragic writer; he
was not a poet; he worked on a much smaller scale, and with far less
significant material. But he was a true dramatist, a subtle
psychologist, and an artist pure and simple. His comedies, too, move
according to the same laws as the tragedies of Racine; they preserve the
same finished symmetry of design, and leave upon the mind the same sense
of unity and grace. But they are slight, etherealized, fantastic; they
are Racine, as it were, by moonlight. All Marivaux's dramas pass in a
world of his own invention--a world curiously compounded of imagination
and reality. At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of
conventional fantasy, playing charmingly round impossible situations
and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin
air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood. But if
Marivaux had been simply fantastic and nothing more, his achievement
would have been insignificant; his great merit lies in his exquisite
instinct for psychological truth. His plays are like Watteau's pictures,
which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect
owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the
realities of life. His characters, like Watteau's, seem to possess, not
quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality--the
distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting
in the human spirit. His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged
of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are
miraculou