al.[30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is
a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if
with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in
poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament
were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously
prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man
in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy,
tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly
lost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but as
undoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect and
delightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of English
poets.

It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great French
moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for
poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues for
instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope.
Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has more
imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all
of them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine,
Boileau, La Fontaine, Moliere, all of them poets full of genius? _It is
not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others; on the
contrary, they suppose them._ I should be much surprised if a great poet
were without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy,
and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totally
devoid of imagination.'[31] With imagination in the highest sense
Vauvenargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essential
to reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not the
single, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. 'All
my philosophy,' he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty
years old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent of
supremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my heart.'[32]

In the same spirit he had well said that there is more cleverness in the
world than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with lofty
character.[33] Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and
impressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for instance, '_Great
thoughts come from the