dora's Box lies there for
the opening, he may see it in what by its nature is the symptom of all
symptoms, the surviving Literature of the Period. Abbe Raynal, with
his lubricity and loud loose rant, has spoken his word; and already the
fast-hastening generation responds to another. Glance at Beaumarchais'
Mariage de Figaro; which now (in 1784), after difficulty enough, has
issued on the stage; and 'runs its hundred nights,' to the admiration of
all men. By what virtue or internal vigour it so ran, the reader of our
day will rather wonder:--and indeed will know so much the better that
it flattered some pruriency of the time; that it spoke what all were
feeling, and longing to speak. Small substance in that Figaro: thin
wiredrawn intrigues, thin wiredrawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing
lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks itself, as through a wholly
mad universe, adroitly, with a high-sniffing air: wherein each, as was
hinted, which is the grand secret, may see some image of himself, and
of his own state and ways. So it runs its hundred nights, and all France
runs with it; laughing applause. If the soliloquising Barber ask: "What
has your Lordship done to earn all this?" and can only answer: "You took
the trouble to be born (Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre)," all
men must laugh: and a gay horse-racing Anglomaniac Noblesse loudest of
all. For how can small books have a great danger in them? asks the Sieur
Caron; and fancies his thin epigram may be a kind of reason. Conqueror
of a golden fleece, by giant smuggling; tamer of hell-dogs, in the
Parlement Maupeou; and finally crowned Orpheus in the Theatre Francais,
Beaumarchais has now culminated, and unites the attributes of several
demigods. We shall meet him once again, in the course of his decline.

Still more significant are two Books produced on the eve of the
ever-memorable Explosion itself, and read eagerly by all the world:
Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, and Louvet's Chevalier de Faublas.
Noteworthy Books; which may be considered as the last speech of old
Feudal France. In the first there rises melodiously, as it were,
the wail of a moribund world: everywhere wholesome Nature in unequal
conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the
lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and death must
strike down the loved one; and, what is most significant of all, death
even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of pr