e had caused to a manuscript of Longus) until the fall of the
Empire. When he was forty-five years old he was known in literature only
as a translator of classics, remarkable for scholarship and for careful
modelling of his style upon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
rather than upon the eighteenth. Although he had hitherto taken little
active part in politics, the so-called 'ideas of 89' had sunk deeply
into him. Impelled, not by any wide views on the future of the nation,
but apparently by the mere _bourgeois_ hatred of titles, old descent,
and the other privileges of the aristocracy, he began a series of
pamphlets to the success of which there is no rival except that of the
Letters of Junius, while Junius falls far short of Courier in intrinsic
literary merit. There are, indeed, few authors whose merit resides so
wholly in their style and power of expression as Courier's. His thought
is narrow in the extreme; even where its conclusions are just it rests
rather on the jealousies of the typical _bourgeois_ than on anything
else. But in irony he has, with the exception of Pascal and Swift, no
superior. He began by a _Petition aux Deux Chambres_. Then he
contributed a series of letters to _Le Censeur_, a reform journal; then
he published various pamphlets, usually signed 'Paul Louis, Vigneron,'
and ostensibly addressed to his neighbours and fellow villagers. He had
established himself on a small estate in Touraine, which he farmed
himself. But he was much in Paris, and his political writings made him
acquainted with the prison of Sainte Pelagie. His death, in April 1825,
was singular, and indeed mysterious. He was shot, the murderer escaping.
It was suspected to be one of his own servants, to whom he was a harsh
and unpopular master, and the suspicion was confirmed some years
afterwards by the confession of a game-keeper. His _Simple Discours_
against the presentation of Chambord to the Duc de Bordeaux, his _Livret
de Paul Louis_, his _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, are all models of their
kind. Nowhere is the peculiar quality which is called in French
_narquois_ displayed with more consummate skill. The language is at once
perfectly simple and of the utmost literary polish, the arguments,
whether good or bad, always tellingly expressed. But perhaps he has
written nothing better than the _Lettre a M. Renouard_, in which he
discusses the mishap with the manuscript of Longus, and the letter to
the _Academie des Inscription