mitations and borrowings from
classical authors are freely and skilfully made. It is a poem in prose,
a romance of education, designed at once to charm the imagination
and to inculcate truths of morals, politics, and religion. The
didactic purpose is evident, yet it remains a true work of art, full
of grace and colour, occasionally, indeed, languid, but often vivid
and forcible.

Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those of
an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the
control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance
of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he
desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate between
the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation
which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs;
in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican.
These ideas are put forth in his _Direction pour la Conscience d'un
Roi_ and the _Plan de Gouvernement_. Louis XIV. suspected the
political tendency of _Telemaque_, and caused the printing of the
first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded
as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather,
by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something
chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible.

Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combative
energy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knows
him only through his _Lettres Spirituelles_, which tend towards the
effacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuet
pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false
mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is
false. In his _Traite de l'Existence de Dieu_ he shows himself a bold
and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character,
attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from
design in nature and from the reason in man; the second part--of a
later date--follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from
our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctions
Fenelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpassed in his time,
unless it be by Boileau. His _Dialogues sur l'Eloquence_ seek to
replace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded with
divisions and subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of
quotations, by a st