nch works figure in many popular collections and are easily
accessible.

[273] He was 'as restless as a hyaena,' says De Quincey, not unjustly.

[274] Professor Mahaffy, _Descartes_. Blackwood, 1880.

[275] 'La philosophie donne moyen de parler vraisemblablement de toutes
choses, et se faire admirer des moins savants.'

[276] Sainte-Beuve, _Port Royal_. 6 vols. Paris, 1859-61.

[277] These men, such as Saint Ibal, Bardouville, Desbarreaux, and
others, figure largely in the anecdotic history of the time. In the
persons of Theophile and Saint Evremond they touch on literature: but
for the most part they were chiefly distinguished by revolting
coarseness and blasphemy of expression, and by a childish delight in
outraging religious sentiment, which was often changed into abject
terror or hypocritical compliance as death approached. They were
commonly called _philosophes_, a degradation of the word which was not
much mended in the next century, though it then acquired a more strictly
literary meaning.

[278] Ed. Simon. 1854.

CHAPTER VII.

THEOLOGIANS AND PREACHERS.

There is no period in the whole course of French literature in which
theological writers and orators contribute so much to literary history
as in the seventeenth century. The causes of this energy can only be
summarily indicated here. They were the various _sequelae_ of the
Reformation and the counter-reformation, the latter of which was in
France extraordinarily powerful; the influence of Richelieu and Mazarin
in politics, which assured to the Church a great predominance in the
State, while its rival, the territorial aristocracy, was depressed and
persecuted; the personal inclination of Louis XIV., who made up for his
loose manner of life by the straitest doctrinal orthodoxy; but perhaps
most of all the accidental determination of various men of great talents
and energy to the ecclesiastical profession. Bossuet, Fenelon,
Bourdaloue, Massillon, Flechier, Mascaron, Claude, Saurin, to name no
others, could hardly have failed to distinguish themselves in any
department of literature which they had chosen. Circumstances of
accident threw them into work more or less wholly theological.

[Sidenote: St. Francois de Sales.]

This peculiarity of the century, however, belongs chiefly to its third
and fourth quarters. The first preacher and theologian of literary
eminence in this period belongs about equally to it and to the
preceding, but his most re