eepest corruption and depravation, retained the mark of
its dismal origin nowhere so strongly as in the distorted prominence
which it gave in the minds of its votaries to the dissolution of the
body. It was one of the first conditions of the Revival of Reason that
the dreary _memento mori_ and its hateful emblems should be deliberately
effaced. 'The thought of death,' said Vauvenargues, 'leads us astray,
because it makes us forget to live.' He did not understand living in the
sense which the dissolute attach to it. The libertinism of his regiment
called no severe rebuke from him, but his meditative temper drew him
away from it even in his youth. It is not impossible that if his days
had not been cut short, he might have impressed Parisian society with
ideas and a sentiment, that would have left to it all its cheerfulness,
and yet prevented that laxity which so fatally weakened it. Turgot, the
only other conspicuous man who could have withstood the license of the
time, had probably too much of that austerity which is in the fibre of
so many great characters, to make any moral counsels that he might have
given widely effective.

Vauvenargues was sufficiently free from all taint of the pedagogue or
the preacher to have dispelled the sophisms of licence, less by argument
than by the gracious attraction of virtue in his own character. The
stock moralist, like the commonplace orator of the pulpit, fails to
touch the hearts of men or to affect their lives, for lack of delicacy,
of sympathy, and of freshness; he attempts to compensate for this by
excess of emphasis, and that more often disgusts us than persuades.
Vauvenargues, on the other hand, is remarkable for delicacy and
half-reserved tenderness. Everything that he has said is coloured and
warmed with feeling for the infirmities of men. He writes not merely as
an analytical outsider. Hence, unlike most moralists, he is no satirist.
He had borne the burdens. 'The looker-on,' runs one of his maxims,
'softly lying in a carpeted chamber, inveighs against the soldier, who
passes winter nights on the river's edge, and keeps watch in silence
over the safety of the land.'[21] Vauvenargues had been something very
different from the safe and sheltered critic of other men's battles,
and this is the secret of the hold which his words have upon us. They
are real, with the reality that can only come from two sources; from
high poetic imagination, which Vauvenargues did not possess, or el