Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France

_This little book, long the subject of my meditation, suddenly began to take shape one Sunday morning when I was your guest at Gisburne. We were actually starting for church, an...

To understand the influence of La Rochefoucauld it is even more needful than in most similar cases to form a clear idea of his character, and this can only be obtained by an out...

"There is something," says La Rochefoucauld, "at once peevish and proud in my appearance. This makes most people think that I am contemptuous, but I am not so at all. So far as...

[Footnote 5: There was unquestionably a strong vein of tenderness running through the stoical character of the Duke, and if we were more intimately acquainted with his private l...

The author of the "Maximes" was the head of one of the great princely houses of France. The author of the "Caractères" was the type of the plebeian citizen of Paris. If La Roche...

Whether he perceived it or not--and I for one am convinced that he did perceive it--La Bruyère introduced a new thing into French literature; he opened out, we may almost say, a...

When we look round for an author of high importance on whom the influence of La Bruyère was direct, we find the most obvious to be an Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spe...

Vauvenargues was twenty-six years of age when the war of the Austrian Succession broke out, and swept him into military action. He was vegetating in garrison at Metz when the ar...

In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets, we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from poetry what we require in the twentie...

When all is of so inspired an order of feeling, it is difficult, it is even invidious, to select. But the figure of Paul Lintier, whose journals have been piously collected by M...

_"The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness! The vaporous exultation not to be confined! .........the animation of delight Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light, And b...

Vauvenargues, Marquis de, 97-132; birth and parentage, 99-101; described as "Clazomène," 121; serves in the Bohemian campaign, 98, 107, 109, 112, in garrison at Arras, 113; in g...