his taste, both in its correctness and its audacity, is perhaps more admirable still. Despite of Malherbe, Balzac, Boileau and the traditions of nearly a century, he dared to speak favourably of Ronsard, and plainly expressed his opinion that the practice of his own contemporaries and predecessors had cramped and impoverished the French language quite as much as they had polished or purified it. The other doctors whom we have mentioned were more purely theological than the accomplished archbishop of Cambray. Flechier is somewhat more archaic in style than Bossuet or Fenelon, and he is also more definitely a rhetorician than either. Mascaron has the older fault of prodigal and somewhat indiscriminate erudition. But the two latest of the series, Bourdaloue and Massillon, had far the greatest repute in their own time purely as orators, and perhaps deserved this preference. The difference between the two repeated that between du Perron and de Sales. Bourdaloue's great forte was vigorous argument and unsparing denunciation, but he is said to have been lacking in the power of influencing and affecting his hearers. His attraction was purely intellectual, and it is reflected in his style, which is clear and forcible, but destitute of warmth and colour. Massillon, on the other hand, was remarkable for his pathos, and for his power of enlisting and influencing the sympathies of his hearers. Of minor preachers on the same side, Charles de la Rue, a Jesuit (1643-1725), and the Pere Cheminais (1652-1680), according to a somewhat idle form of nomenclature, "the Racine of the pulpit," may be mentioned. The two Protestant ministers whom we have mentioned, though inferior to their rivals, yet deserve honourable mention among the ecclesiastical writers of the period. Claude engaged in a controversy with Bossuet, in which victory is claimed for the invincible eagle of Meaux. Saurin, by far the greater preacher of the two, long continued to occupy, and indeed still occupies, in the libraries of French Protestants, the position given to Bossuet and Massillon on the other side.