re were native
impulses which suggested the pose; and at times, as in the
_Itineraire_, the pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is
not extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the passion which
makes the imaginative power its instrument, were his in a supereminent
degree.

CHAPTER II
THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

While the imagination of France was turning towards the romance of
the Middle Ages and the art of Christianity, Hellenic scholarship
was maintained by Jean-Francois Boissonade. The representative of
Hellenism in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined
artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of a Greek
manuscript better than he loved a victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MERE
(1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; in
the history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces
of Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in
dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure and
in malice. The translator of _Daphnis and Chloe_, wearied by war and
wanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines at
Veretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincial
popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist reaction. He
is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, occupied with affairs of the
parish. Shall Chambord be purchased for the Duke of Burgundy? shall
an intolerant young _cure_ forbid the villagers to dance? shall
magistrates harass the humble folk? Such are the questions agitating
the country-side, which the vine-dresser Courier will resolve. The
questions have been replaced to-day by others; but nothing has quite
replaced the _Simple Discours_, the _Petition pour les Villageois_,
the _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, in which the ease of the best sixteenth
and seventeenth century prose is united with a deft rapier-play like
that of Voltaire, and with the lucidity of the writer's classical
models.

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was the
satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE
(1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revolt
of the soul; when he assailed the authority of the individual reason,
it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of the
Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republican
soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against
the Revolutionary aggression in his _L