rench by
the twelfth century, and it increases during every century that
succeeds: while joined to sobriety it begets that satirical criticism,
which is so noteworthy a secondary product of French.

A third quality closely connected with the two former but not, like
satirical criticism, simply derived from them, is the close _attention
to form_ which has always distinguished French. At the present time,
despite the great advance made by other literatures and a certain
falling off in itself, French prose is on the average superior in formal
merit to any other prose written in a modern language. If we look back
for eight hundred years, French verse is found to be more carefully and
artistically arranged than the corresponding poetical beginnings of any
other European country. In the excogitation of careful rules and the
deft carrying out of those rules no literature can on the whole approach
this except Greek. No literature therefore, with that exception, gives
so much of the pleasure which is given by the spectacle of not
unreasonable difficulty skilfully overcome in a game which is well
played.

A fourth merit is to be found in the _inventiveness_ of Frenchmen of
letters. In no literature is there a greater variety, and in none is
that variety so obviously the effect not of happy blundering but of
organised and almost scientific development of the possibilities of art.
The wonderful fertility with which the early Trouveres handled and
re-handled the motives of the Arthurian and Carlovingian legends has
been noticed; and, as a very different but complementary instance, the
surprising success and variety with which a scheme so limited as that of
the classical tragedy was applied, deserves mention. At the present day
in one important department of literature (the drama) inventiveness is
almost limited to Frenchmen, and there are few periods of their present
history at which they have not in this respect led the van in one
department or in another.

Yet another characteristic must be noted, which is, in respect to
matter, the complement of the already mentioned attention to form. This
is the singular _clearness_ and _precision_ with which not merely the
greatest Frenchmen of letters, but all save the least, are accustomed to
put their meaning. Whereas the two great classical languages, from the
licence of order given by their abundant inflections and complicated
syntax, are sometimes enigmatic; whereas German notoriously