his gaze, as though he were hearkening to some ever-flowing inward
stream of divine melody. We think of that gracious touch in Bacon's
picture of the father of Solomon's House, that 'he had an aspect as
though he pitied men.' If we reproach France in the eighteenth century
with its coarseness, artificiality, shallowness, because it produced
such men as the rather brutish Duclos, we ought to remember that this
was also the century of Vauvenargues, one of the most tender, lofty,
cheerful, and delicately sober of all moralists.


[Footnote 1: _Pensées_, i. v. 8.]

[Footnote 2: _Ib._ i. vi. 16.]

[Footnote 3: _Ib._ i. vii. 6.]

[Footnote 4: M. Gilbert's edition of the _Works and Correspondence of
Vauvenargues_ (2 vols. Paris: Furne, 1857), ii. 133.]

[Footnote 5: _Éloge de P.H. de Seytres_. _OEuv._ i. 141-150.]

[Footnote 6: _OEuv._ ii. 233. See too p. 267.]

[Footnote 7: No. 579, i. 455.]

[Footnote 8: _Réflexions sur Divers Sujets_, i. 104.]

[Footnote 9: _OEuv._ ii. 249.]

[Footnote 10: _Ib._ ii. 265.]