t they never dominated him to the
exclusion of good sense. His philosophy--if we may call so airy a thing
by such a name--was the philosophy of some gentle whimsical follower of
Epicurus. He loved nature, but unromantically, as he loved a glass of
wine and an ode of Horace, and the rest of the good things of life. As
for the bad things--they were there; he saw them--saw the cruelty of the
wolf, and the tyranny of the lion, and the rapacity of man--saw that--

Jupin pour chaque etat mit deux tables au monde;
L'adroit, le vigilant, et le fort sont assis
A la premiere; et les petits
Mangent leur reste a la seconde.

Yet, while he saw them, he could smile. It was better to smile--if only
with regret; better, above all, to pass lightly, swiftly, gaily over the
depths as well as the surface of existence; for life is short--almost as
short as one of his own fables--

Qui de nous des clartes de la voute azuree
Doit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun moment
Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?

The age was great in prose as well as in poetry. The periods of
BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as
clearly as the couplets of Racine. Unfortunately, however, in the case
of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all
that a modern reader can appreciate: the substance is for the most part
uninteresting and out-of-date. The truth is that Bossuet was too
completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance
to after generations. His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our
hearts. The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and
his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents
for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis. The
average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as
Bossuet thought--though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never
spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of
the most ordinary of his congregation. He saw all round his age, but he
did not see beyond it. Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of
the world was limited. The order of things under Louis XIV was the one
order: outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan.
If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of
life, more of his work would have been enduring. But it happened that,
while by birth he w