to the rites
of the Church. But it is obvious that he was as little of a Christian,
in any definite sense of the word, as any humanist of the fifteenth
century.

The light thrown in this fashion upon the social, moral, and
intellectual characteristics of the time constitutes the chief value of
all its historical literature, except the great philosophico-historical
works of Montesquieu and Turgot. It has a certain flimsiness about it;
it is brilliant journalism rather than literature properly so called;
the dialect in which it is written wants the gravity and sonorousness,
the colour and the poetry, of the seventeenth and earlier centuries. But
it is unmatched in power of social portraiture. Written, as much of it
is, by men of the middle class, and more of it by men who, from whatever
class they sprang, were deeply interested in social, economical, and
political problems, it is free from that ignoring of any life and class
except that of the nobility which mars much of the work of earlier
times. The picture it gives is very far from being a flattering one. The
nature to which the mirror is held up is in most cases a decidedly
corrupt nature; but the mirror is held frankly, and the reflection is
useful to posterity.

FOOTNOTES:

[289] In studying the history, and especially the memoirs, of the
eighteenth century, the reader is at a disadvantage, inasmuch as the
admirable collections of MM. Buchon, Petitot, Michaud et Poujoulat,
etc., do not extend beyond its earliest years. Their place is very
imperfectly supplied by a collection in twenty-eight small volumes,
edited by F. Barriere for MM. Didot. This is useful as far as it goes,
but it is very far from complete; much of it is in extract only, and the
component parts of it are not selected as judiciously as they might be.
Separate editions of the principal memoirs of the century are of course
obtainable, and the number is being constantly increased; but such
separate editions are far less useful than the collections which enable
the memoir-writing of France during five centuries of its history to be
studied at an advantage scarcely to be paralleled in the literature of
any other nation.

[290] Her earlier contemporary, Madame de Tencin, is her chief
competitor.

CHAPTER V.

ESSAYISTS, MINOR MORALISTS, CRITICS.

[Sidenote: Occasional Writing in the Eighteenth-century. Periodicals.]

What may be, for want of a better word, called occasional writing in