ubles.
His best known work, the _Esquisse des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_, was
written while he was a fugitive and in concealment. He was at last
discovered and arrested, but the day after he was found dead in his
prison at Bourg la Reine, having apparently poisoned himself (March,
1794). Condorcet's works are voluminous, and partake strongly of the
_philosophe_ character. He is not remarkable for originality of thought,
and may indeed be said to be for the most part a mere exponent of the
current ideas of the second stage of the _philosophe_ movement. But his
style has great merits, being clear, forcible, and correct, suffering
only from the somewhat stereotyped forms, and from the absence of
flexibility and colour which distinguish the later eighteenth century in
France.

[Sidenote: Volney.]

One more remarkable name deserves to be mentioned in this place as the
last of the _Philosophes_ proper, that is to say, of those writers who
carried out the general principles of the Encyclopaedist movement with
less reference to specialist departments of literature than to a certain
general spirit and tendency. This was Constantin Francois de
Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, by which latter name he is generally
known. Volney was born in 1757, at Caron, in Anjou, and was educated at
Angers, and afterwards at Paris. He studied both medicine and law, but
having a sufficient fortune, practised neither. In 1783 he set out on
his travels and journeyed to the East, visiting Egypt and Syria; an
account of which journey he published four years later. When he returned
to France he was from the beginning a moderate partisan of the
Revolution, and, like most such persons, he was arrested during the
Terror, though he escaped with no worse fate than imprisonment.
Immediately after Thermidor, Volney published his most celebrated work,
_Les Ruines_, a treatise on the rise and fall of empires from a general
and philosophical point of view. Shortly after this he visited the
United States, whence he returned in 1798. He had known Napoleon in
early days, and on the establishment of the Consulate he was appointed a
senator; nor was his resignation accepted, though it was tendered when
Bonaparte assumed the crown. His countship was Napoleonic, but he was
always an opponent of the emperor's policy. Accordingly, after the
Restoration, he was nominated by Louis XVIII. as a member of the new
House of Peers. He died in 1820. Besides the books already noti