in this connection than in
any other--but unconventional and independent; and he provoked great
wrath among his brethren by reflecting on the abuses of the conventual
system. _Palombe_ appears to be not uninteresting, but after all it is
but one of those parasitic exercises which have rarely been great except
in the hands of very great genius. Historically, perhaps, the much less
famous _Evenemens Singuliers_ (2 vols., 1628) are more important, though
they cannot be said to be very amusing. For (to the surprise, perhaps,
of a reader who comes to the book without knowing anything about it) it
is composed of pure Marmontel-and-Miss-Edgeworth Moral Tales about
_L'Ami Desloyal_, _La Prudente Mere_, _L'Amour et la Mort_,
_L'Imprecation Maternelle_, and the like. Of course, as one would expect
from the time, and the profession of the author, the meal of the
morality is a little above the malt of the tale; but the very titles are
"germinal."

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Hedelin d'Aubignac--_Macarise._]

Francois Hedelin, Abbe d'Aubignac, is one of those unfortunate but
rarely quite guiltless persons who live in literary history much more by
the fact of their having attacked or lectured greater men than
themselves, and by witticisms directed against them, than by their own
actual work, which is sometimes not wholly contemptible. He concerns us
here only as the author of a philosophical-heroic romance, rather
agreeably entitled _Macarise ou La Reine des Iles Fortunees_, where the
bland naivete of the pedantry would almost disarm the present members of
that Critical Regiment, of which the Abbe, in his turn, was not so much
a chaplain as a most combatant officer. The very title goes on to
neutralise its attractiveness by explaining--with that benignant
condescension which is natural to at least some of its author's
class--that it "contains the Moral Philosophy of the Stoics under the
veil of several agreeable adventures in the form of a Romance"; and that
we may not forget this, various side-notes refer to passages in an
_Abrege_ of that philosophy. The net is thus quite frankly set in the
sight of the bird, and if he chooses to walk into it, he has only
himself to blame. The opening is a fine example of that plunge into the
middle of things which Hedelin had learnt from his classical masters to
think proper: "Les cruels persecuteurs d'Arianax l'ayant reduit a la
necessite de se precipiter[210] dans le