OR MORALISTS, CRITICS.

The enormous popularity which the Essays of Montaigne enjoyed could not
fail to raise up imitators and followers in the century succeeding their
publication. But Montaigne's influence on the production of short
pieces, complete in themselves and having for the most part an ethical
bearing, was supplemented by the feature of the time so often referred
to, the fancy for literary _coteries_, and for wit combats between the
members of those _coteries_. For this latter purpose pieces of moderate
length in prose, corresponding to the sonnets, the madrigals, and
such-like things in verse, were well suited. The Academy, too, with its
competitions and its ordinary critical occupations, stimulated literary
production in the same direction. The essay was therefore much
cultivated in the seventeenth century, and not a few minor styles of
composition descended from it. Such were the _Pensee_, a short essay on
some definite and briefly handled point; the _Conversation_, an essay or
sketch in dialogue; the _Portrait_, a sketch of personal character; the
_Maxime_, a condensed _Pensee_, just as the _Pensee_ was a condensed
essay. In these various styles some of the most excellent work existing
in French literature was composed during the time which we are at
present handling; and four names of the first, or almost the first rank
in literary history, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, and Saint
Evremond, belong to this division, besides not a few others of less
importance. Pascal, indeed, might be almost as well treated in either of
the two following chapters as in the present; but if the substance of
his work is for the most part philosophical or theological, the form of
it seems to fall more suitably under the present head. He does not,
however, open the series of Essayists.

[Sidenote: Balzac.]

Something of Montaigne's manner, as well as of his peculiar sceptical
doubt, which nevertheless does not transcend the limits of orthodoxy,
was continued far into the century by La Mothe le Vayer, a man of
talent, but of some deliberate eccentricity and archaism in costume and
manners as in style. But the most important name in the history of
French prose next after that of Montaigne is that of Jean Guez de
Balzac, who occupies nearly the same place in it as Malherbe does in
that of French poetry. Balzac was a gentleman of rank and fortune in the
province of Angoumois, where he was born towards the end of the
si