ce.

Although the great lights which adorned the literature of the preceding
reign no longer shone,--such geniuses as Moliere, Boileau, Racine,
Fenelon, Bossuet, Pascal, and others,--still the eighteenth century was
much more intellectual and inquiring than is generally supposed. Under
Louis XIV. intellectual independence had been nearly extinguished. His
reign was intellectually and spiritually a gloomy calm between two
wonderful periods of agitation. All acquiesced in his cold, heartless,
rigid rule, being content to worship him as a deity, or absorbed in the
excitements of his wars, or in the sorrows and burdens which those wars
brought in their train. But under Louis XV. the people began to meditate
on the causes of their miseries, and to indulge in those speculations
which stimulated their discontents or appealed to their intellectual
pride. Not from La Rochelle, not from the cells of Port Royal, not from
remonstrating parliaments did the voices of rebellion come: the genius
of Revolution is not so poor as to be obliged to make use of the same
class of instruments, or repeat the same experiments, in changing the
great aspects of human society. Nor will she allow, if possible, those
who guard the fortresses which she wishes to batter down to be
suspicious of her combatants. Her warriors are ever disguised and
masked, or else concealed within some form of a protecting deity, such
as the fabled horse which the doomed Trojans received within their
walls. The court of France did not recognize in those plausible
philosophers, whose writings had such a charm for cultivated intellect,
the miners and sappers of the monarchy. Only one class of royalists
understood them, and these were the Jesuits whom the court had exiled.
Not even Frederic the Great, when he patronized Voltaire, was aware what
an insidious foe was domiciled in his palace, with all his sycophancy
of rank, with all his courtly flattering. In like manner, when the grand
seigneurs and noble dames of that aristocratic age wept over the sorrows
of the "New Heloise," or craved that imaginary state of untutored
innocence which Rousseau so morbidly described, or admired those
brilliant generalizations of laws which Montesquieu had penned, or
laughed at the envenomed ironies of Voltaire, or quoted the atheistic
doctrines of D'Alembert and Diderot, or enthusiastically discussed the
economical theories of Dr. Quesnay and old Marquis Mirabeau,--that stern
father of him