Qui de nous des clartés de la voûte azurée
Doit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun moment
Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?

The age was great in prose as well as in poetry. The periods of
BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as
clearly as the couplets of Racine. Unfortunately, however, in the case
of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all
that a modern reader can appreciate: the substance is for the most part
uninteresting and out-of-date. The truth is that Bossuet was too
completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance
to after generations. His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our
hearts. The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and
his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents
for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis. The
average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as
Bossuet thought--though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never
spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of
the most ordinary of his congregation. He saw all round his age, but he
did not see beyond it. Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of
the world was limited. The order of things under Louis XIV was the one
order: outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan.
If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of
life, more of his work would have been enduring. But it happened that,
while by birth he was an artist, by profession he was a theologian; and
even the style of Bossuet can hardly save from oblivion the theological
controversies of two hundred years ago. The same failing mars his
treatment of history. His _Histoire Universelle_ was conceived on broad
and sweeping lines, and contains some perspicacious thinking; but the
dominating notion of the book is a theological one--the illustration,