ly too, their
works and their representatives. And therein it is that more than one
sovereign and more than one age have found their purest glory to consist.
Virgil, Horace, and Livy contributed quite as much as the foundation of
the empire to shed lustre on the reign of Augustus. Bossuet, Pascal, and
Fenelon, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Moliere, and La Fontaine, count for
quite as much as his great warriors and his able administrators in regard
to the splendor of the age of Louis XIV. People are quite right to set
this estimate upon the heroes of the human mind and upon their works;
their portion in the history of mankind is certainly not the most
difficult, but it is that which provides both those who give and those
who take with the purest delights, and which is the least dear in respect
of what it costs the nation.

The reign of Francis I. occupies the first half of the century (the
sixteenth), which has been called the age of Renaissance. Taken
absolutely, and as implying a renaissance, following upon a decay of
science, literature, and art, the expression is exaggerated, and goes
beyond the truth; it is not true that the five centuries which rolled by
between the establishment of the Capetians and the accession of Francis
I. (from 987 to 1515), were a period of intellectual barrenness and
decay; the middle ages, amidst the anarchy, violence, and calamities of
their social condition, had, in philosophy, literature, and art, works of
their own and a glory of their own, which lacked not originality, or
brilliancy, or influence over subsequent ages. There is no idea of
telling their history here; we only desire to point out, with some sort
of precision, their special character and their intellectual worth.

At such a period, what one would scarcely expect to find is intellectual
ambition on a very extensive scale and great variety in the branches of
knowledge and in the scope of ideas. And yet it is in the thirteenth
century that we meet for the first time in Europe and in France with the
conception and the execution of a vast repertory of different scientific
and literary works produced by the brain of man, in fact with a veritable
Encyclopaedia. It was a monk, a preaching friar, a simple Dominican
reader (lector qualiscumque), whose life was passed, as he himself says,
by the side and under the eye of the superior-general of his order, who
undertook and accomplished this great labor. Vincent of Beauvais, bor