journalism tends more and more to divert information from
the channel of conversation into the channel of the Press; no one is
satisfied with a more circumscribed audience than that very indeterminate
abstraction "the public," and men find a vent for their opinions not in
talk, but in "copy." We read the _Athenaeum_ askance at the tea-table,
and take notes from the _Philosophical Journal_ at a soiree; we invite
our friends that we may thrust a book into their hands, and presuppose an
exclusive desire in the "ladies" to discuss their own matters, "that we
may crackle the _Times_" at our ease. In fact, the evident tendency of
things to contract personal communication within the narrowest limits
makes us tremble lest some further development of the electric telegraph
should reduce us to a society of mutes, or to a sort of insects
communicating by ingenious antenna of our own invention. Things were far
from having reached this pass in the last century; but even then
literature and society had outgrown the nursing of coteries, and although
many _salons_ of that period were worthy successors of the Hotel de
Rambouillet, they were simply a recreation, not an influence. Enviable
evenings, no doubt, were passed in them; and if we could be carried back
to any of them at will, we should hardly know whether to choose the
Wednesday dinner at Madame Geoffrin's, with d'Alembert, Mademoiselle de
l'Espinasse, Grimm, and the rest, or the graver society which, thirty
years later, gathered round Condorcet and his lovely young wife. The
_salon_ retained its attractions, but its power was gone: the stream of
life had become too broad and deep for such small rills to affect it.

A fair comparison between the French women of the seventeenth century and
those of the eighteenth would, perhaps, have a balanced result, though it
is common to be a partisan on this subject. The former have more
exaltation, perhaps more nobility of sentiment, and less consciousness in
their intellectual activity--less of the _femme auteur_, which was
Rousseau's horror in Madame d'Epinay; but the latter have a richer fund
of ideas--not more ingenuity, but the materials of an additional century
for their ingenuity to work upon. The women of the seventeenth century,
when love was on the wane, took to devotion, at first mildly and by
halves, as English women take to caps, and finally without compromise;
with the women of the eighteenth century, Bossuet and Massillon