possessed the passion of the eighteenth century for science and
free-thought, he showed himself to be a serious man, and because he had
wit he showed himself an amusing serious man, which is rare. His
_Dialogues of the Dead_ were very humorous and, at the same time, in many
passages profound; he wrote his _Discourses on the Plurality of_
(Habitable) _Worlds_; then because he was perpetual secretary of the
Academy of Sciences, came his charming and often astonishing _Eulogies of
Sages_, which ought to be regarded as the best existent history of
science in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth up to 1740.

BAYLE.--Bayle, a Frenchman who lived in Holland on account of religion, a
journalist and lexicographer, in his _News of the Republic of Letters_
and in his immense _Dictionary_, gave proof of broad erudition about all
earthly questions, especially philosophical and religious, guiding his
readers to absolute scepticism. Fontenelle and Bayle are the two heralds
who opened the procession of the eighteenth century. Successively must
now be examined first the poets and then the prose writers of the first
half of that era.

LA MOTTE.--La Motte, as celebrated in his own time as he is forgotten in
ours, was lyricist, fabulist, dramatic orator, epical even after a
certain fashion. He wrote odes that were deadly cold, fables that were
often quite witty but affected and laboured, comedies sufficiently
mediocre, of which _The Magnificent Lover_ was the most remarkable,
and a tragedy, _Inez de Castro_, which was excellent and enjoyed one of
the greatest successes of the French stage. Finally, becoming the
partisan of the modernists against the classicists, he abridged the
_Iliad_ of Homer into a dozen books as frigid as his own lyric poems. He
had parodoxical ideas in literature, and, being a poet, or believing
himself one, he considered that verse enervated thought and that