hought worthy the attention of posterity. The chief
theological names in this department have already been named in naming
those of the other. Of the school of Port Royal, who preached little but
wrote much, J. J. Duguet, a man of great talent and saintly life,
deserves mention.

FOOTNOTES:

[279] Bossuet's works are extremely voluminous. The most important of
them are easily obtainable in the _Collection Didot_ and similar
libraries.

[280] There is a fairly representative edition of Fenelon in five vols.
large 8vo. Didot. Separate works are easily accessible.

[281] Edition as in Fenelon's case. Selections of all the orthodox
sermon-writers are abundant.

[282] This was an album to which the poets of the day, from Corneille
downwards, contributed verses, each on a different flower.

INTERCHAPTER III.

SUMMARY OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE.

The tendencies of the period which has been surveyed in the foregoing
book must be sufficiently obvious from the survey itself. They had been,
as far as the unsatisfactory result of them went, indicated with
remarkably prophetic precision by Regnier in lines quoted above[283].
The work, not merely of Malherbe, which the satirist had directly in
view, but of Boileau, who succeeded Malherbe and completed his task, had
tended far too much in the direction of substituting a formal regularity
for an elastic freedom and of discouraging the more poetical utterances
of thought. In prose, however, the operation of not dissimilar
tendencies had been almost wholly good. For it is in the nature of prose
not to admit of too absolute regulation, and it is at the same time in
its nature to require that regulation up to a certain point. If the
French vocabulary had been somewhat impoverished, it had been
considerably refined. All good authorities admit that the influence of
the salon-coteries and the _precieuses_--mischievous as it was in some
ways--was of no small benefit in purifying not merely manners but
speech. A single book, the _Historiettes_ of Tallemant des Reaux, shows
sufficiently the need of this double purification. French literature has
at no time been distinguished by prudery, but from the fifteenth to the
middle of the seventeenth century (for, as has been pointed out, the
courtly literature at least of the middle ages is free from this defect)
it had added to its liberty in choice and treatment of subjects a
liberty which amounted to the extremest licence in