, Duclos, Condillac, Buffon, Grimm, D'Holbach, with many others
whom we must not stay even to mention, contributed to the work.

The influence of the "Encyclopaedia," great during its day, is by no
means yet exhausted. But it is an influence indirectly exerted, for the
"Encyclopaedia" itself has long been an obsolete work.

There is a legal maxim that the laws are silent, when a state of war
exists. Certainly, amid the madness of a Revolution such as, during the
closing years of the eighteenth century, the influence of Voltaire,
Rousseau, and the Encyclopaedists, with Beaumarchais, reacting against
the accumulated political and ecclesiastical oppressions of ages,
precipitated upon France, it might safely be assumed that letters would
be silent. But the nation meantime was portentously preparing material
for a literature which many wondering centuries to follow would occupy
themselves with writing.

XVIII.

EPILOGUE.

In looking backward over the preceding pages, we think of many things
which we should like still to say. Of these many things, we limit
ourselves to saying here, as briefly as we can, some four or five only.

To begin with, in nearly every successive case, we have found ourselves
lamenting afresh that, from the authors to be represented, the
representative extracts must needs be so few and so short. We have,
therefore, sincerely begrudged to ourselves every line of room that we
felt obliged to occupy with matter, preparatory, explanatory, or
critical, of our own. Whatever success we may have achieved in
fulfilling our purpose, our purpose has been to say ourselves barely so
much as was indispensable in order finally to convey, upon the whole, to
our readers, within the allotted space, the justest and the fullest
impression of the selected authors, through the medium of their own
quoted words.

In the second place, it was with great regret that we yielded to the
necessity of omitting entirely, or dismissing with scant mention, such
literary names, for example, as Boileau, of the age of Louis Quatorze,
and, a little later than he, Fontenelle, spanning with his century of
years the space from 1657 to 1757,--these, and, belonging to the period
that ushered in the Revolution, Bernardin St. Pierre, the teller of the
tale of "Paul and Virginia," with also that hero of a hundred romantic
adventures, Beaumarchais, half Themistocles, half Alcibiades, the author
of "The Barber of Seville." The line had