wards--in 1821. The three chief works of Joseph de
Maistre are _Du Pape_, 1817, _De l'Eglise Gallicane_, and the unfinished
_Soirees de St. Petersbourg_. The two first compose a complete treatise
on the power and position of the pope in relation both to the temporal
and to the ecclesiastical form of national government. The author is the
most uncompromising of ultramontanes. According to him the pope is the
source of all authority on earth, and temporal princes are little more
than his delegates. Except in relation to religious error, Joseph de
Maistre is not hostile to a certain ordered measure of liberty accorded
by their rulers to peoples and individuals. But, strongly impressed by
the social and moral, as well as the political and religious anarchy
brought about first by the _philosophe_ movement, and then by the
Revolution, he sees the only chance of rescue in the establishment of a
hierarchy of government culminating in that from which there is no
appeal, the single authority of the pope. He is thus a legitimist with a
difference. The _Soirees de St. Petersbourg_, which are unfinished and
not entirely uniform in plan, deal nominally with the providential
government of the world, but diverge to a large number of subjects. It
is in this book that the author develops the kind of modified terrorism
which is often, though not altogether justly, considered to be his chief
characteristic, eulogising the executioner as the foundation of society.

Joseph de Maistre is unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and
writers of the eighteenth century. Paradoxical and strained as his
system frequently appears, it is rigorously logical. An ordered
theocracy seems to him the only polity capable of giving peace and true
prosperity to the world, and he shapes all his theories so as to fit in
with this central conception. On detached subjects his thoughts are
always vigorous, and often strikingly original. His reading was great,
and his skill in polemics of the very highest. No one possesses in
larger measure the art of hostile criticism without descending to actual
abuse. These merits of themselves imply purely literary accomplishments,
clearness, distinctness, forcible expression, in a rare kind and degree.
But Joseph de Maistre is more than this as a writer. He possesses,
though he only occasionally exercises it, a brilliant faculty of
rhetoric. His phrase is more than merely clear and forcible; it has a
peculiar incisiveness an