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fluence in France was generally good; in England, after the Restoration, they were too Frenchified by their foreign education to be sensible of the immense value of our imaginative literature. In their criticism of English literature of intelligence they were doubtless right—at least, we have Arnold's authority for so believing.

But criticism is only a part of Saint-Evremond's literary activity. He wrote two comedies, some excellent "conversations" or dialogues, many delightful letters, numbers of essays, moral and philosophical, and quantities of verse. He wrote a political study, the discovery of which during the trial of Fouquet caused his exile. Above all he excelled in "polite conversation." In his younger days he had a knack of fine satire (witness the famous conversation of the Maréchal d'Hoquincourt and le Père Canaye) which for delicacy and point reminds one of no less a genius than M France. Indeed, it makes us regret that Saint-Evremond wasted so much of his time and verve on trifles. Had the novel been as respectable a form then as two centuries later, had Saint-Evremond been a little less indolent, what a novel he might have left us, with his fine gift of style, his skill in dialogue, his penetration in reading character and his ability to record it! He persisted in regarding himself merely as a cultivated gentleman whose pleasure it was to appreciate great writers and to "polish his wit" by contact with their works; and we are forced to acquiesce, though with immense regret, in his aristocratic prejudice. Was there ever a case of greater literary nonchalance than his refusal to re-write the chapters of his most ambitious work, the Réflexions sur les Divers Génies du Peuple Romain, after Waller had lost them in the confusion of the Plague and the Fire? And how lacking in curiosity this bon esprit was! There in the first years of his exile was the old London of the Tudors and Stuarts, with its bridge of houses, its streets of timbered shops, its extraordinary moving crowds, its multitudinous sects and characters; and he says not a word of it. There later was Shakespeare being played and widely read; Milton publishing Paradise Lost; and Dryden engaged in his combats with dullards; and he missed it all. Certainly rather a high price to pay for an impeccability of tenue and an Epicurean tranquillity.

Among all the Epicureans of various shades of opinion produced by Gassendi, Saint-Evremond is perhaps the most delicate, the most genuine, and the most attractive in his character and philosophy.