d look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy
See over all secular and temporal authorities. It would be just
as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic's
business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral
influences on the society of that time, of the _New Heloisa_,
therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow,
particularly fit to be a model and a hero for young Ireland. Only on
the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be
held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circumstances a
Dantonist.

The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and
an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple
enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had
impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of
the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that
century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau,
his chapters on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and
incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the
literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody
knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its
men and all its works. Voltaire's furies, Diderot's indigestions,
Rousseau's nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole
of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous
horseplay of the transcendental humourist. Then the tide began to
turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of civilisation had something
to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte's
Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who,
five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different
judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social
history of Western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in
the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution
laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet banter was not all, and
even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written
from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the
balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better
side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and
their worse side unduly left in the background. It may well have been
that an impression