sobriety,
and hope, are not surpassed in prose literature. "One of the noblest
qualities in our nature," he said, "is that we are able so easily to
dispense with greater perfection."

"Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its
motives."

"To do great things a man must live as though he
had never to die."

"The first days of spring have less grace than the
growing virtue of a young man."

"You must rouse in men a consciousness of their
own prudence and strength if you would raise their
character."

Just as Tocqueville said: "He who despises mankind will never get the
best out of either others or himself."[1]

[Footnote 1: The reader who cares to know more about Vauvenargues will
find a chapter on him in the present writer's _Miscellanies_, vol.
ii.]

The best known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as it is the deepest and the
broadest, is the far-reaching sentence already quoted, that "Great
thoughts come from the heart." And this is the truth that shines out
as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the "wide, grey, lampless
depths" of time. Those have been greatest in thought who have been
best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort. And
next to them come the great stern, mournful men, like Tacitus, Dante,
Pascal, who, standing as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection
of some of the moods of Shelley or Keats as from the savage fury
of Swift, watch with a prophet's indignation the heedless waste of
faculty and opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and paltry aim,
as if we were the flies of a summer noon, which do more than any
active malignity to distort the noble lines, and to weaken or to
frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human nature. For practical
purposes all these complaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson
found the complaint that of the globe so large a space should be
occupied by the uninhabitable ocean, encumbered by naked mountains,
lost under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat or petrified by
perpetual frost, and so small a space be left for the production of
fruits, the pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of men.

When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the time that is absorbed
in sleep, or appropriated to the other demands of nature, or the
inevitable requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn from
us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly stolen from us by languor,
we may realise of how small a portion of