langue."]

"I wept for joy while I read these 'Lives' [of Plutarch]. No night
went by but I had spent part of it in talking to Alcibiades, to
Agesilas, or to others. I walked in the streets of Rome that I might
argue with the Gracchi, and when stones were flung at Cato, there was
I to defend him. You remember that when Caesar wished to pass a law
which was too much in favour of the populace, Cato tried to prevent
his doing so, and put his hand on Caesar's mouth to prevent his
speaking? These modes of action, so unlike our fashions of to-day,
made a deep impression on me."

He attributed to the teaching of Plutarch his introduction to the
master-passions of his brief future existence, namely, his devotion to
a sense of heroic duty and his determination to live up to the measure
of his high calling. In the pages of Plutarch he says that he
discovered "la vraie grandeur de notre ame"; here was exposed before
him a scene of life illustrated by "virtue without limit, pleasure
without infamy, wit without affectation, distinction without vanity,
and vices without baseness and without disguise." This boyish
appreciation is worthy of our attention, because it contains the
future moral teaching of Vauvenargues as in a nutshell. To our great
regret, it is the only positive record which survives of the
adolescence of this great mind, on whose development we should so
gladly dwell if it were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases
Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than
the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest
days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17]

[Footnote 17: We know, at least, that he taught himself to
write on the "sedulous ape" system, by imitating Bossuet and
Fenelon. He must have been in several respects very much
like Robert Louis Stevenson. His modesty led him to distrust
his own taste, and it is worthy of notice that the
corrections he made to please Voltaire often reduce the
vigour of his thought in its original expression. Voltaire--
it is beyond conjecture why--cancelled the famous maxim,
"Les feux de l'aurore".]

How harshly his tastes were condemned at home may be judged by an
anecdote about his father which occurs in the "Essai sur quelques
caracteres":--

"Anselme was shocked that his son should show a taste for science. He
burnt the young man's papers and books, and when he learned that h