that of school books.
They are, however, all good examples of the easy, correct, and lucid, if
cold and conventional, tongue of the later eighteenth century.

[Sidenote: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.]

Rousseau had a far more important disciple in fiction. Jacques Henri
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was born at Havre in 1737. He was by
profession an engineer, and both professionally and on his private
account wandered about the world in a curious fashion. At last he met
Rousseau, and the influence of Jean Jacques developed the sentimental
morality, the speculative republicanism, and the ardent, if rather
affected, love of nature which had already distinguished him. His best
book, _Paul et Virginie_, is perhaps the only one of his works which can
properly be called a novel; but _La Chaumiere Indienne_ deserves to be
classed with it, and even the _Etudes de la Nature_ are half fiction.
_Paul et Virginie_ was written when the author's admiration of nature
and of the savage state, imbibed from Rousseau or quickened by his
society, had been further inflamed by a three years' residence in
Mauritius. Like the books mentioned in the last paragraph, _Paul et
Virginie_ has lost something by becoming a school-book, but its faults
and merits are in a literary sense greater than theirs. The over-ripe
sentiment and the false delicacy of it will always remain evidence of
the stimulating but unhealthy atmosphere in which it was written. But it
cannot be denied that, both here and elsewhere in Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, there is a very remarkable faculty of word-painting, and
also of influencing the feelings.

[Sidenote: Restif de la Bretonne.]

The later eighteenth century saw a vast number of novelists and novels,
few of which were of much literary value, while most of them displayed
the evil influences of the time in more ways than one. Dulaurens, a
vagabond and disreputable writer, is chiefly remembered for his _Compere
Mathieu_, a book presenting some points of likeness to _Jacques le
Fataliste_, and like it inspired partly by Sterne, and partly by
Sterne's master, Rabelais. Writers like Louvet and La Clos continued the
worst part of Crebillon's tradition without exhibiting either his
literary skill or his wit. A much more remarkable name is that of Restif
de la Bretonne, who has been called, and not without reason, the French
Defoe. He was born at Sacy in Burgundy in 1734, and died at Paris in
1806. Although of very humble birth, he