respecters of religion but ardently and avowedly religious, who treat morality from the point of view of the Bible and the church, there arose side by side with them, or only a little later, a very different group of moralists, whose writings have been as widely read, and who have had as great a practical and literary influence as perhaps any other class of authors. The earliest to be born and the last to die of these was Charles de Saint-Denis, seigneur de saint-Evremond (1613-1703). Saint-Evremond was long known rather as a conversational wit, some of whose good things were handed about in manuscript, or surreptitiously printed in foreign lands, than as a writer, and this is still to a certain extent his reputation. He was at least as cynical as his still better known contemporary La Rochefoucauld, if not more so, and he had less intellectual force and less nobility of character. But his wit was very great, and he set the example of the brilliant societies of the next century. Many of Saint-Evremond's printed works are nominally works of literary criticism, but the moralizing spirit pervades all of them. No writer had a greater influence on Voltaire, and through Voltaire on the whole course of French literature after him. In direct literary value, however, no comparison can be made between Saint-Evremond and the author of the _Sentences et maximes morales_. Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), has other literary claims besides those of this famous book. His _Memoires_ were very favourably judged by his contemporaries, and they are still held to deserve no little praise even among the numerous and excellent works of the kind which that age of memoir-writers produced. But while the _Memoires_ thus invite comparison, the _Maximes et sentences_ stand alone. Even allowing that the mere publication of detached reflections in terse language was not absolutely new, it had never been carried, perhaps has never since been carried, to such a perfection. Beside La Rochefoucauld all other writers are diffuse, vacillating, unfinished, rough. Not only is there in him never a word too much, but there is never a word too little. The thought is always fully expressed, not compressed. Frequently as the metaphor of minting or stamping coin has been applied to the art of managing words, it has never been applied so appropriately as to the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. The form of them is almost beyond praise, and its excellencies, combined with their immense and enduring popularity, have had a very considerable share in influencing the character of subsequent French literature. Of hardly less importance in this respect, though of considerably less intellectual and literary individuality, was the translator of Theophrastus and the author of the _Caracteres_, La Bruyere. Jean de la Bruyere (1645-1696), though frequently epigrammatic, did not aim at the same incredible terseness as the author of the _Maximes_. His plan did not, indeed, render it necessary.