ntense compression (he described his literary aim
in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book in a page, a
page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'), while all have the same
lucidity and freedom from enigma. All are alike polished in form and
style according to the best models of the seventeenth century; but
whereas study and reflection might have been sufficient to give Joubert
the material of his other thoughts, the wide difference between his
literary judgments and those of his time is less easily explicable. No
finer criticism on style and on poetry in the abstract exists than his,
and yet his reading of poetry cannot have been very extensive. He is
even just to the writers of the eighteenth century, whose manner he
disliked, and whose society he had abjured. He seems, indeed, to have
had almost a perfect faculty of literary appreciation, and wherever his
sayings startle the reader it will generally be found that there is a
sufficient explanation beneath. There is probably no writer in any
language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal
variety of subjects in an equally small space, and with an equally high
and unbroken excellence of style and expression. This is the intrinsic
worth of Joubert. In literary history he has yet another interest, that
of showing in the person of a man living out of the literary world, and
far removed from the operation of cliques, the process which was
inevitably bringing about the great revolution of 1830.

[Sidenote: Courier.]

Like Joubert, Paul Louis Courier had a great dislike and even contempt
for the authors of the eighteenth century, but curiously enough this
dislike did not in the least affect his theological or political
opinions. He was born at Paris, in 1772, being the son of a wealthy man
of the middle class. His youth was passed in the country, and he early
displayed a great liking for classical study. As a compromise between
business, which he hated, and literature, of which his father would not
hear, he entered the army in 1792. He served on the Rhine, and not long
after joining broke his leave in a manner rather unpleasantly resembling
desertion. His friends succeeded in saving him from the consequences of
this imprudence, and he served until Wagram, when he finally left the
army, again in very odd circumstances. He then lived in Italy (where his
passion for the classics led him into an absurd dispute about an alleged
injury h