s youth.
Indeed, he was still in his youth when he went to the wars. His culture
always remained narrow. He did not know Greek and Latin, when to know
Greek and Latin was, as it were, the whole of scholarship. To crown his
accidental disqualifications for literary work, he fell a victim to the
small-pox, which left him wrecked in body. This occurred almost
immediately after he abandoned a military career which had been fruitful
to him of hardship, but not of promotion. In spite of all that was thus
against him, Vauvenargues, in those years, few and evil, that were his,
thought finely and justly enough to earn for himself a lasting place in
the literary history of his nation. He was in the eighteenth century of
France, without being of it. You have to separate him in thought from
the infidels and the "philosophers" of his time. He belongs in spirit to
an earlier age. His moral and intellectual kindred was with such as
Pascal, far more than with such as Voltaire. Vauvenargues is, however, a
writer for the few, instead of for the many. His fame is high, but it is
not wide. Historically, he forms a stepping-stone of transition to a
somewhat similar nineteenth-century name, that of Joubert. A very few
sentences of his will suffice to indicate to our readers the quality of
Vauvenargues. Self-evidently, the following antithesis drawn by him
between Corneille and Racine is subtly and ingeniously thought, as well
as very happily expressed--this, whatever may be considered to be its
aptness in point of literary appreciation:--

Corneille's heroes often say great things without inspiring them;
Racine's inspire them without saying them.

Here is a good saying:--

It is a great sign of mediocrity always to be moderate in praising.

There is worldly wisdom also here:--

He who knows how to turn his prodigalities to good account,
practises a large and noble economy.

Virgil's "They are able, because they seem to themselves to be able," is
recalled by this:--

The consciousness of our strength makes our strength greater.

So much for Vauvenargues.

VI.

LA FONTAINE.

1621-1695.

La Fontaine enjoys a unique fame. He has absolutely "no fellow in the
firmament" of literature. He is the only fabulist, of any age or any
nation, that, on the score simply of his fables, is admitted to be poet
as well as fabulist. There is perhaps no other literary name whatever
among the French, by long pr