n it by utterances of various kinds. In 1788
(the year before the Revolution) he excited the laughter of all Paris,
and the intense hatred of the hack-writers of his time, by publishing,
in conjunction with Champcenetz, an _Almanach de nos Grands Hommes_, in
which, by a mixture of fiction and fact, he caricatures his smaller
contemporaries in the most pitiless manner. When the Revolution broke
out Rivarol took the Royalist side, and contributed freely to its
journals. He soon found it necessary to leave the country, and lived for
ten years in Brussels, London, Hamburg, and Berlin, publishing
occasionally pamphlets and miscellaneous works. He died at the Prussian
capital in 1801. Not only has Rivarol a considerable claim as a critic,
and a very high position as a political pamphleteer, but he is as much
the master of the prose epigram as Chamfort is of the short anecdote.
Following the example of his predecessors, he put many of his best
things in a treatise, _De l'Homme Intellectuel et Moral_, which, as a
whole, is very dull and unsatisfactory, though it is lighted up by
occasional flashes of the most brilliant wit. His detached sayings,
which are not so much _Pensees_ or maxims as conversational good things,
are among the most sparkling in literature, and, with Chamfort's, occupy
a position which they keep almost entirely to themselves. It has been
said of him and of Chamfort (who, being of similar talents and on
opposite sides, were naturally bitter foes) that they 'knew men, but
only from the outside, and from certain limited superficial and
accidental points of view. They knew books, too, but their knowledge was
circumscribed by the fashions of a time which was not favourable to
impartial literary appreciation. Hence their anecdotes are personal
rather than general, rather amusing than instructive, rather showing the
acuteness and ingenuity of the authors than able to throw light on the
subjects dealt with. But as mere tale-tellers and sayers of sharp things
they have few rivals.' It may be added that they complete and sum up the
merits and defects of the French society of the eighteenth century, and
that, in so far as literature can do this, the small extent of their
selected works furnishes a complete comment on that society.

[Sidenote: Joubert.]

Contemporary with these two writers, though, from the posthumous
publication of his works years after the end of his long life, he seems
in a manner a contemporary of