Produced by Paul Murray, Luis Amador and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net CRITICAL MISCELLANIES BY JOHN MORLEY VOL. II. Essay 1: Vauvenargues London MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1905 CONTENTS OF VOL. II. PAGE The influence of Pascal 1 Vauvenargues holds the balance between him and the votaries of Perfectibility 4 Birth, education, and hard life of Vauvenargues 4 Life in Paris, and friendship with Voltaire 10 His religious sentiment 12 His delicacy, reserve, and psychagogic quality 15 Certain inability to appreciate marked originality 17 Criticisms on Moliere, Racine, and Corneille 19 Comparison with English aphoristic writers and moralists 20 Character the key to his theory of greatness 25 His exaltation of spontaneous feeling, a protest against Rochefoucauld and Pascal 26 His plea for a normal sense of human relation, the same 28 His doctrine of the Will connected with his doctrine of Character 29 Antipathy to ascetic restrictions 33 Two ways of examining character: that followed by Vauvenargues 34 Examples of his style 36 The beauty of his nature to be read in his face 40 [Transcriber's Note: Footnotes have been moved to end of book.] VAUVENARGUES.