mbrian
pictures around, how often such background is marred by grotesque,
natural, or architectural detail, by incongruous or childish incident.
In this cool, pearl-grey, quiet place, where colour tells for
double--the jewelled cope, the painted book in the hand of Mary, the
chaplet of red coral--one is reminded that among all classical writers
Raphael's preference was for the faultless Virgil. How orderly, how
divinely [61] clean and sweet the flesh, the vesture, the floor, the
earth and sky! Ah, say rather the hand, the method of the painter!
There is an unmistakeable pledge of strength, of movement and animation
in the cast of the Baptist's countenance, but reserved, repressed.
Strange, Raphael has given him a staff of transparent crystal. Keep
then to that picture as the embodied formula of Raphael's genius. Amid
all he has here already achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet
assurance of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the
scholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, from first to
last, "I am utterly purposed that I will not offend."

NOTES

38. *A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students, Oxford,
2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1892, and
now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.

PASCAL*

[62] ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views of
a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had
spoken with authority--the question as to the amount of freedom left to
man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him--had seemed
likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival sects.
In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed itself into
a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and the religious
community of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten but for the
intervention of a new writer in whom French literature made more than a
new step. It became at once, as if by a new creation, what it has
remained--a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.

In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of "Letters
to a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series of [63]
pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was
laid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment the quarrel
turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by
the University of Paris as a religious bod