palingenesie sociale_, good in style but vague in substance. Of theology proper there is almost necessarily little or nothing, the clergy being in the earlier period proscribed, in the latter part kept in a strict and somewhat discreditable subjection by the Empire. In moralizing literature there is one work of the very highest excellence, which, though not published till long afterwards, belongs in point of composition to this period. This is the _Pensees_ of Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), the most illustrious successor of Pascal and Vauvenargues, and to be ranked perhaps above both in the literary finish of his maxims, and certainly above Vauvenargues in the breadth and depth of thought which they exhibit. In pure literary criticism more particularly, Joubert, though exhibiting some inconsistencies due to his time, is astonishingly penetrating and suggestive. Of science and erudition the time was fruitful. At an early period of it appeared the remarkable work of Pierre Cabanis (1757-1808), the _Rapports du physique et du morale de l'homme_, a work in which physiology is treated from the extreme materialist point of view but with all the liveliness and literary excellence of the Philosophe movement at its best. Another physiological work of great merit at this period was the _Traite de la vie et de la mort_ of Bichat, and the example set by these works was widely followed; while in other branches of science Laplace, Lagrange, Hauy, Berthollet, &c., produced contributions of the highest value. From the literary point of view, however, the chief interest of this time is centred in two individual names, those of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, and in three literary developments of a more or less novel character, which were all of the highest importance in shaping the course which French literature has taken since 1824. One of these developments was the reactionary movement of Maistre and Bonald, which in its turn largely influenced Chateaubriand, then Lamennais and Montalembert, and was later represented in French literature in different guises, chiefly by Louis Veuillot (1815-1883) and Mgr Dupanloup (1802-1878). The second and third, closely connected, were the immense advances made by parliamentary eloquence and by political writing, the latter of which, by the hand of Paul Louis Courier (1773-1825), contributed for the first time an undoubted masterpiece to French literature. The influence of the two combined has since raised journalism to even a greater pitch of power in France than in any other country. It is in the development of these new openings for literature, and in the cast and complexion which they gave to its matter, that the real literary importance of the Revolutionary period consists; just as it is in the new elements which they supplied for the treatment of such subjects that the literary value of the authors of _Rene_ and _De l'Allemagne_ mainly lies. We have already alluded to some of the