ers of the poet Voiture. Balzac, as is natural in
the first attempts at a polished prose style, has the drawback of being
somewhat rhetorical and occasionally ponderous. But the important point
is that the mechanism of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph has
evidently been considered by him, and that he has succeeded in getting
it into very tolerable condition. His sentences no longer run on to the
interminable length of earlier writers, or finish in the haphazard
manner, neglectful of rhythm, balance, and proportion, also noticeable
in his predecessors. The substitution of the full stop for the
conjunction, which, speaking generally, may be said to be the initiating
secret of style (though of course it must not be applied too
indiscriminately), is at once apparent in Balzac's best passages, and he
rarely falls into the error which waits on this substitution, the error
of scrappiness. His style is perhaps better suited to oratory than to
writing; a not unlikely result, since his models were pretty obviously
the classical orators. But there can be no doubt that to him in no small
part is due the extraordinary outburst of rhetorical power which
distinguished the preachers of the latter half of the century. Nor was
it long before what was faulty in Balzac's style was corrected by the
example of very different writers.

[Sidenote: Pascal.]

Blaise Pascal[266] was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, on the 19th of
June, 1623. His father was President of the Court of Aids, but when the
boy was eight years old the family moved to Paris. Pascal was one of the
small number of extraordinarily precocious children who have justified
their precocity by genius equally extraordinary in after-life; but it
does not appear that he was forced by his father (who took the whole
charge of his education), and it is said that he did not begin Latin
until he was twelve years old--a very late age for the time.
Mathematics, however, were his chief study and delight, and he early
excelled in them, showing also an extraordinary faculty in applying them
to physics. At nineteen he invented a calculating machine. But his
application to study did not improve his health. He was but
five-and-twenty at the time of his famous experiment with the barometer
on the Puy de Dome in his native province. He was soon exposed to the
philosophical influence of Descartes on the one hand, and the
theological influence of the Jansenists on the other, and he felt bo