iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs
better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism
of the State. Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.
Spinoza, if this were written _circa_ 1665, has in view, perhaps, the
Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port
Royal aux Champs.

[3] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast
intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance
which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the
imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe
alone of moderns have the power to reproduce. The _De Civitate_ is his
greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in
intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery
and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and
the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has
curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan
poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism
indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the
comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the
men of after times who loved them most--Tacitus and St. Augustine,
Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.

[4] The _World-History_ of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the _De
Civitate_ of St. Augustine. He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"
_i.e._, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval
standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the
year A.D. 1146. His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the
Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in
the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his
habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval
monastery invests the work. In the following year he started on the
crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote
his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the
emperor Barbarossa.

[5] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this
word have all been disputed. Thus the use of the original is
convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories
of theologians or Hebraists. Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with
scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograp