Excess was a condition of thought, feeling, and speech, that in every
form was disagreeable to him; alike in the gloom of Pascal's reveries,
and in the inflation of speech of some of the heroes of Corneille. He
failed to relish even Montaigne as he ought to have done, because
Montaigne's method was too prolix, his scepticism too universal, his
egoism too manifest, and because he did not produce complete and
artistic wholes.[28]

Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance,
evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. He
is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of
immutable first principles. Perhaps this was what the elder Mirabeau
meant when he wrote to Vauvenargues, who was his cousin: 'You have the
English genius to perfection,' and what Vauvenargues meant when he wrote
of himself to Mirabeau: 'Nobody in the world has a mind less French than
I.'[29] These international comparisons are among the least fruitful of
literary amusements, even when they happen not to be extremely
misleading; as when, for example, Voltaire called Locke the English
Pascal, a description which can only be true on condition that the
qualifying adjective is meant to strip either Locke or Pascal of most of
his characteristic traits. And if we compare Vauvenargues with any of
our English aphoristic writers, there is not resemblance enough to make
the contrast instructive. The obvious truth is that in this department
our literature is particularly weak, while French literature is
particularly strong in it. With the exception of Bacon, we have no
writer of apophthegms of the first order; and the difference between
Bacon as a moralist and Pascal or Vauvenargues, is the difference
between Polonius's famous discourse to Laertes and the soliloquy of
Hamlet.