our own, was Joseph Joubert, the last
great _Pensee_-writer of France and of Europe. Joubert's birthplace was
Montignac, in Perigord, and the date of his birth 1754, three years
after that of Rivarol, and about twelve after that of Chamfort. He was
educated at Toulouse, where, without taking regular orders, he joined
the Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne, a teaching community, and studied
and taught till he was twenty-two years old. Then his health being, as
it was all through his life, weak, he returned home, and succeeding
before long to a small but sufficient fortune, he went to Paris. Here he
became intimate with the second _philosophe_ generation (La Harpe,
Marmontel, etc.), and is said to have for a time been an enthusiastic
hearer of Diderot, the most splendid talker of that or any age. But
Joubert's ideals and method of thought were radically different from
those of the _Philosophes_, and he soon found more congenial literary
companions, of whom the chief were Fontanes and Chenedolle, while he
found his natural home in the salon of two ladies of rank and
cultivation, Madame de Beaumont and Madame de Vintimille. Before long he
married and established himself in Paris with a choice library, into
which, it is said, no eighteenth-century writer was admitted. His health
became worse and worse, yet he lived to the age of seventy, dying in
1824. Fourteen years afterwards Chateaubriand, at the request of his
widow, edited a selection of his remains, and four years later still his
nephew, M. de Raynal, produced a fuller edition.

Joubert's works consist (with the exception of a few letters)
exclusively of _Pensees_ and maxims, which rank in point of depth and of
exquisite literary expression with those of La Rochefoucauld, and in
point of range above them. They are even wider in this respect than
those of Vauvenargues, which they also much resemble. Ethics, politics,
theology, literature, all occupy Joubert. In politics he is, as may be
perhaps expected from his time and circumstances, decidedly
anti-revolutionary. In theology, without being exactly orthodox
according to any published scheme of orthodoxy, Joubert is definitely
Christian. In ethics he holds a middle place between the unsparing
hardness of the self-interest school and the somewhat gushing manner of
the sentimentalists. But his literary thoughts are perhaps the most
noteworthy, not merely from our present point of view. All alike have
the characteristic of i