HISTORY: DRAMA.--In history Voltaire furnished a model of vivid, rapid,
truly epic narration in his _History of Charles XII_, and an example, at
least, of exact documentation and of contemporaneous history studied with
zeal and passion in his _Philosophical Letters on England_. On the stage,
in prose there were the pretty, witty, and biting light comedies of
Dancourt, De Brueys and Palaprat, and Dufresny, then the delicious drama,
at once fantastic and perceptive, romantic and psychological, of
Marivaux, who, in _The Legacy_, _The False Confidences_, _The Test_,
_The Game of Love and of Shame_, showed himself no less than the true
heir of Racine and the only one France has ever had.

VOLTAIRE.--In the second portion of the eighteenth century, Voltaire
reigned. He multiplied historical studies (_Century of Louis XIV_),
philosophies (_Philosophical Dictionary_), dramas (_Zaire_, _Merope_,
_Alzire_ [before 1750], _Rome Saved_, _The Chinese Orphan_, _Tancred_,
_Guebres_, _Scythia_, _Irene_), comedies (_Nanine_, _The Prude_),
romances(_Tales and Novels_), judicial exquisitions (the Calas, Labarre,
and Sirven cases), and articles, pamphlets, and fugitive papers on
all conceivable subjects.

THE PHILOSOPHERS.--But the second generation of philosophers was now
reached. There was Diderot, philosophical romancer (_The Nun_, _James the
Fatalist_), art critic(_Salons_), polygraphist (collaboration in the
Encyclopaedia); there was Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosophic novelist in
_The New Heloise_, publicist in his discourse against _Literature and the
Arts and Origin of Inequality_, schoolmaster in his _Emilius_, severe
moralist in his _Letters to M. d'Alembert on the Spectacles_,
half-romancer, charming, impassioned, and passion-inspiring in the
autobiography which he called his Confessions; there was Duclos,