cratic privilege, the venality of justice, the greed of
courtiers, the chicanery of politicians. Figaro, since he appeared
in "The Barber of Seville," has grown somewhat of a moralist and a
pedant; he must play the part of censor of society, he must represent
the spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the cause of
intelligence against the authority of rank and station. Beaumarchais
may have lacked elevation and delicacy, but he knew his craft as a
dramatist, and left a model of prose comedy from which in later years
others of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He restored
mirth to the stage; he rediscovered theatrical intrigue; he created
a type, which was Beaumarchais himself, and was also the lighter
genius of France; he was the satirist of society; he was the
nimble-feathered bird that foretells the storm.

III

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand and
the romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling for
external nature attained through him a wider range, embracing the
romance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; at
the same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque,
and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. He
added to French literature a tale in which human passion and the
sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; he
created two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircled
with a halo of love and sorrow.

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was an
Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry
disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures.
Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic
record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancy
caught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean,
he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far from
a corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagant
designs upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767
commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream
was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrels
followed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as an
engineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies,
the mountains, the tropical fo