misled by his bitterness of spirit; his mind was not capacious, his
sympathies were not liberal; his knowledge, especially of Greek
letters, was defective. But he knew the great age of Louis XIV., and
he felt the beauty of its art. No one has written with finer
intelligence of Racine than he in his _Lycee, ou Cours de Litterature_.
As the Revolution approached he sympathised with its hopes and fears;
the professor donned the _bonnet rouge_. The storm which burst
silenced his voice for a time; in 1793 he suffered imprisonment; and
when he occupied his chair again, it was a converted Laharpe who
declaimed against philosophers, republicans, and atheists, the
tyrants of reason, morals, art and letters.

The finest and surest judgment in contemporary literature was that
of a gallicised German--MELCHIOR GRIMM (1723-1807). As Laharpe was
bound in filial loyalty to Voltaire, so Grimm was in fraternal
attachment to the least French of eighteenth-century French
authors--Diderot. From a basis of character in which there was a
measure of Teutonic enthusiasm and romance, his intellect rose clear,
light, and sure, with no mists of sentiment about it, and no clouds
of fancy. During thirty-seven years, as a kind of private journalist,
he furnished princely and royal persons of Germany, Russia, Sweden,
Poland, with "Correspondence," which reflected as from a mirror all
the lights of Paris to the remote North and East. His own philosophy,
his political views, were cheerless and arid; but he could judge the
work of others generously as well as severely. No one of his generation
so intelligently appreciated Shakespeare; no one more happily
interpreted Montaigne. By swift _apercu_, by criticism, by anecdote,
by caustic raillery, or serious record, he makes the intellectual
world of his day pass before us and expound its meanings. The
Revolution, the dangers of which he divined early, drove him from
Paris. In bidding it farewell he wished that he were in his grave.

III

Buffon, whose power of wing was great, and who did not love the heat
and dust of combat, soared smoothly above the philosophic strife.
Born in 1707, at Montbard, in Burgundy, GEORGE-LOUIS LECLERC, created
Comte de BUFFON by Louis XV., fortunate in the possession of riches,
health, and serenity of heart and brain, lived in his domestic circle,
apart from the coteries of Paris, pursuing with dignity and infinite
patience his proper ends. The legend describes him as a pom