ond love in spite of her resolve, and becomes the happy
victim of her own tender heart and of the devices of her assailants.
The "marivaudage" of Marivaux is sometimes a refined and novel mode
of expressing delicate shades and half-shades of feeling; sometimes
an over-refined or over-subtle attempt to express ingenuities of
sentiment, and the result is then frigid, pretentious, or pedantic.
No one excelled him in the art, described by Voltaire, of weighing
flies' eggs in gossamer scales.

The Abbe A.-F. PREVOST D'EXILES (1697-1763) is remembered by a single
tale of rare power and beauty, _Manon Lescaut_, but his work in
literature was voluminous and varied. Having deserted his
Benedictine monastery in 1728, he led for a time an irregular and
wandering life in England and Holland; then returning to Paris, he
gained a living by swift and ceaseless production for the booksellers.
In his journal, _Le Pour et le Contre_, he did much to inform his
countrymen respecting English literature, and among his translations
are those of Richardson's _Pamela_, _Sir Charles Grandison_, and
_Clarissa Harlowe_. Many of his novels are melodramatic narratives
of romantic adventure, having a certain kinship to our later romances
of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis, in which horror and pity,
blood and tears abound. Sometimes, however, when he writes of passion,
we feel that he is engaged in no sport of the imagination, but
transcribing the impulsive speech of his own tumultuous heart. The
_Memoires d'un Homme de Qualite_, _Cleveland_, _Le Doyen de
Killerine_ are tragic narratives, in which love is the presiding
power.

_Manon Lescaut_, which appeared in 1731, as an episode of the first
of these, is a tale of fatal and irresistible passion. The heroine
is divided in heart between her mundane tastes for luxury and her
love for the Chevalier des Grieux. He, knowing her inconstancy and
infirmity, yet cannot escape from the tyranny of the spell which has
subdued him; his whole life is absorbed and lost in his devotion to
Manon, and he is with her in the American wilds at the moment of her
piteous death. The admirable literary style of _Manon Lescaut_ is
unfelt and disappears, so directly does it bring us into contact with
the motions of a human heart.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophy, on the one
hand, invaded the novel and the short tale; on the other hand it was
invaded by a flood of sentiment. An irritated an