epid and
vigorous spirit. Lively and gallant sallies of humour to his female
friends, sagacious judgments on the position of Europe to political
people, bits of learned criticism for erudite people, tender and playful
chat with his two daughters, all these alternate with one another with
the most delightful effect. Whether he is writing to his little girl
whom he has never known, or to the king of Sardinia, or to some author
who sends him a book, or to a minister who has found fault with his
diplomacy, there is in all alike the same constant and remarkable play
of a bright and penetrating intellectual light, coloured by a humour
that is now and then a little sardonic, but more often is genial and
lambent. There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the
bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more
elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and
bouquet of some of the fortifying and stimulating wines of Burgundy,
from which time and warmth have not yet drawn out a certain native
roughness that lingers on the palate. This hardness, if one must give
the quality a name that only imperfectly describes it, sprang not from
any original want of impressionableness or sensibility of nature, but
partly from the relentless buffetings which he had to endure at the
hands of fortune, and partly from the preponderance which had been given
to the rational side of his mind by long habits of sedulous and accurate
study. Few men knew so perfectly as he knew how to be touching without
ceasing to be masculine, nor how to go down into the dark pits of human
life without forgetting the broad sunlight, nor how to keep habitually
close to visible and palpable fact while eagerly addicted to
speculation. His contemplations were perhaps somewhat too near the
ground; they led him into none of those sublimer regions of subtle
feeling where the rarest human spirits have loved to travel; we do not
think of his mind among those who have gone

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.

If this kind of temper, strong, keen, frank, and a little hard and
mordent, brought him too near a mischievous disbelief in the dignity of
men and their lives, at least it kept him well away from morbid weakness
in ethics, and from beating the winds in metaphysics. But of this we
shall see more in considering his public pieces than can be gathered
from his letters.

The discomforts of De Maistre's life at