very alert and furnishing important contributions to history.

MORALISTS: DU VAIR.--Finally, there were moralists such as Du Vair, too
long forgotten, and Montaigne. Du Vair was an eloquent orator who
exhibited plenty of courage during the troubles of the League; he left
some fine philosophical treatises: _The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics_,
_On Constancy and Consolation in Public Calamities_, etc.

MONTAIGNE.--Montaigne, less grave and stoical, a far better writer, and
one of the two or three greatest masters of prose France ever produced,
possessed excellent sense sharpened with wit and enriched with a charming
imagination. According to his humour--now stoic, next epicurean, then
sceptic--always wise and refined and also always the sincere admirer of
greatness of soul and of courage, he is the best of advisers and of
companions through life, and of him more than of anyone else it ought to
be said: "To have found pleasure in him is to have profited by him." The
sole reproach could be that he wrote a little too much of himself,
that is, in entering into personal details that could well have been
spared.

COMMENCEMENT OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--The first half of the
seventeenth century in France was only the corollary of the sixteenth,
though naturally with some distinctive personalities and with one,
practically isolated, effort of reaction against that sixteenth century.
At that period could be found writing men, like Agrippa d'Aubigne, who
were absolutely in the spirit of the previous century; d'Aubigne,
amiable, gracious, and also fairly often witty, which is too frequently
forgotten, was ardent, passionate, a rough and violent fighter more
particularly in his _tragedies_, which are baldly crude satires,
illumined with astonishingly beautiful passages fairly frequent in