peat a few reflexions of his own. These he introduces
with the words: "Everything has been said, and we arrive too late into
a world of men who have been thinking for more than seven thousand
years. In the field of morals, all that is fairest and best has been
reaped already; we can but glean among the ancients and among the
cleverest of the moderns." In this insinuating manner, he leads the
reader on to the perusal of his own part of the book, and soon we
become aware how cold and dry and pale the Greek translation seems
beside the rich and palpitating world of the new French morality.

Whether he perceived it or not--and I for one am convinced that he did
perceive it--La Bruyere introduced a new thing into French literature;
he opened out, we may almost say, a new world. The classical attitude
of the great age had produced splendid manifestations of thought and
form. However revolutionary it pleases us of 1918 to be, we cannot get
away from the perfection of the age of Bossuet and Racine and La
Fontaine and Fenelon. We come back to these solid and passionate
writers after each one of our romantic excursions, not entirely
satisfied with them, as our forefathers were, but with a sense of
their solid glory, with a confidence in their permanent value in
stimulating and supporting human effort. They may not give us all that
they were once presumed to give, but they offer us a firm basis; they
are always there for the imagination to start from. We must not
forget, of course, that in 1688 in Paris these classics of the hour
represented a great deal more than that; their prestige was
untarnished. They so completely outshone, in cultivated opinion, all
else that had been produced since the Christian era, that the Italy of
Dante, the Spain of Cervantes, and the England of Shakespeare did not
so much as exist. If the intelligence was not satisfied by Descartes,
well! there was nothing for it but to go back to Plato, and if Racine
did not sufficiently rouse the passions, they must be worked upon by
Sophocles. In all this, the divines took a particularly prominent
place because they alone presented something for which no definite
parallel could be found in antiquity. It was the great theologians of
the age with whom La Bruyere chiefly competed.

These theologians were themselves artists to a degree which we have
now a difficulty in realizing, although in the seventeenth century the
Church of England also had some great artists in