his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il (man)
se regarde comme egare dans ce canton detourne de la nature, et de ce
petit cachot ou il se trouve loge, qu'il apprenne the earth, et
soi-meme a son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable a tous
sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un meme sens change selon les
paroles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the
malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la mediocrite n'est
bon, he says,--epris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was--C'est
sortir de l'humanite que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de l'ame
humaine consiste a savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus le
pyrrhonisme--that is ever his word for scepticism--que ce qu'il y en a
qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous etaient ils auraient tort. You may
even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic intimacy with
the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lachete, of the human heart, so
that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study
for those who have a native tendency to corruption.

The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of
man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness, the
caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issue
of his existence--that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced on
Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passes
at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That
prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent,
contemptible, lache, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in
things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks
out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the
world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which
have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we
are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might
expect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full
working still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world,
though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed
somewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all,
can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic eclairs of
divine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating,
sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens