they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to
hear ----- proclaimed a sublime genius in the same circles which sneer
down Voltaire!"

Voltaire is out of fashion in France, but Rousseau still maintains his
influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the
two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation
is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and the
danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away. In
Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive; their uses
cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to construct as
well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more absurd than his
constructions, still man loves to look back and see even delusive
images--castles in the air--reared above the waste where cities have
been. Rather than leave even a burial-ground to solitude, we populate it
with ghosts.

By degrees, however, as he mastered all the features of the French
literature, Maltravers become more tolerant of the present defects, and
more hopeful of the future results. He saw in one respect that that
literature carried with it its own ultimate redemption.

Its general characteristic--contradistinguished from the literature of
the old French classic school--is to take the _heart_ for its study; to
bring the passions and feelings into action, and let the Within have its
record and history as well as the Without. In all this our contemplative
analyst began to allow that the French were not far wrong when they
contended that Shakspeare made the fountain of their inspiration,--a
fountain which the majority of our later English Fictionists have
neglected. It is not by a story woven of interesting incidents, relieved