poverty, pain, regret, remorse, fear, even hope,--which is
sometimes not less painful than fear itself,--animosity, disgust,
and resentment can never enter there.

The leaden good sense of Louis XIV. pronounced Fenelon the "most
chimerical" man in France. The Founder of the kingdom of heaven would
have been a dreamer, to this most worldly-minded of "Most Christian"
monarchs. Bossuet, who, about to die, read something of Fenelon's
"Telemachus," said it was a book hardly serious enough for a clergyman
to write. A more serious book, whether its purpose be regarded, or its
undoubted actual influence in moulding the character of a prospective
ruler of France, was not written by any clergyman of Fenelon's or
Bossuet's time.

Fenelon was an eloquent preacher as well as an elegant writer. His
influence exerted in both the two functions, that of the writer and that
of the preacher, was powerfully felt in favor of the freedom of nature
in style as against the conventionality of culture and art. He
insensibly helped on that reform from a too rigid classicism which in
our day we have seen pushed to its extreme in the exaggerations of
romanticism. Few wiser words have ever been spoken on the subject of
oratory, than are to be found in his "Dialogues on Eloquence."

French literature, unfortunately, is on the whole such in character as
to need all that it can show, to be cast into the scale of moral
elevation and purity. Fenelon alone is, in quantity as in quality,
enough, not indeed to overcome, but to go far toward overcoming, the
perverse inclination of the balance.

XIV.

MONTESQUIEU.

1689-1755.

To Montesquieu belongs the glory of being the founder, or inventor, of
the philosophy of history. Bossuet might dispute this palm with him; but
Bossuet, in his "Discourse on Universal History," only exemplified the
principle which it was left to Montesquieu afterward more consciously to
develop.

Three books, still living, are associated with the name of
Montesquieu,--"The Persian Letters," "The Greatness and the Decline of
the Romans," and "The Spirit of Laws." "The Persian Letters" are a
series of epistles purporting to be written by a Persian sojourning in
Paris and observing the manners and morals of the people around him. The
idea is ingenious; though the ingenuity, we suppose, was not original
with Montesquieu. Such letters afford the writer of them an admirable
advantage for telling satire on conte