l purpose of contrasting the beneficent
influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of
civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side
by side in radiant innocence and purest companionship; then passion
makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and
the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide,
the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours
of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close.
Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feel
the life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion.
Something was gained by Bernardin from the _Daphnis and Chloe_ of
Longus in the motives and the details of his story, but it is
essentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its most
ardent admirers was Napoleon.

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul and
a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithful
housekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between the
devotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues
of the _Institut_. His later writings added nothing to his fame. _La
Chaumiere Indienne_--the story of a pariah who learns wisdom from
nature and from the heart--has a certain charm, but it lacks the power
of the better portions of _Paul et Virginie_. The _Harmonies de la
Nature_ is a feeble reflection of the _Etudes_. Chateaubriand, to
whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition of
the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a more
generous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name
of God; among the great events of the time his death was almost
unnoticed.

IV

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the labours
of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revival
of the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for classical art.
The Count de Caylus (1692-1765), travelling in Italy and the East
with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist, presented in his writings
an ideal of beauty and grace which was new to sculptors and painters
of the time. The discovery of Pompeii followed, after an interval,
the discovery of Herculaneum. The Abbe BARTHELEMY (1716-95) embodied
the erudite delights of a lifetime in his _Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis
en Grece_ (1788), which seemed a revelation of the genius of Hellenism
a