copious, and sonorous eloquence, fed from recollections of Holy Writ and
of the Fathers, being insistent, convincing, and persuasive. His few
funeral orations (on Henrietta of France, Henrietta of England, the
Prince de Conde) are prose poems of glory, grief, and piety. He wrote
against all those he regarded as enemies of true religion (_History
of Variations_, _Quarrels of Quietness_), controversial works sparkling
with irony and exalted eloquence. He traced in his _Universal
History_ the great design in all its stages of God towards humanity
and the world. He knew all the resources of the French language and of
French style, and in his hands they were expanded. Despite his errors,
which were those of his epoch, his date counts in the history of France
as a great date, the date in which the religion to which he belonged
reached its apogee and when the grand style of French prose was in its
zenith.

MADAME DE SEVIGNE.--Madame de Sevigne only wrote letters to her friends;
but they were so witty, lively, picturesque, admirable in aptly
recounting the anecdotes of her day and in depicting the scenes and
those concerned in them, written in a style so brisk and seductive,
uniting the promise of 1630 with the harvest of 1670, that her work still
remains one of the greatest favourites with people of literary taste.

She was the friend of M. de la Rochefoucauld, of Cardinal de Retz, and of
that amiable, refined, and gentle Mme. de la Fayette, whose novel, _The
Princess of Cleves_, is still read with interest and emotion.

LA BRUYERE.--La Bruyere translated and continued Theophrastus; he was a
moralist, or rather a depicter of morals. He described the court, the
town, and (very rarely) the village and the country. He was on the
lookout for fools in order to be their scourge. He painted, or, better