Both in England and in France there had been during the whole of the century a mania for character writing, both of the general and Theophrastic kind, and of the historical and personal order. The latter, of which our own Clarendon is perhaps the greatest master, abound in the French memoirs of the period. The former, of which the naive sketches of Earle and Overbury are English examples, culminated in those of La Bruyere, which are not only light and easy in manner and matter, but also in style essentially amusing, though instructive as well. Both he and La Rochefoucauld had an enduring effect on the literature which followed them--an effect perhaps superior to that exercised by any other single work in French, except the _Roman de la rose_ and the _Essais_ of Montaigne. Controversy between Ancients and Moderns. _17th-century Savants._--Of the literature of the 17th century there only remains to be dealt with the section of those writers who devoted themselves to scientific pursuits or to antiquarian erudition of one form or another. It was in this century that literary criticism of French and in French first began to be largely composed, and after this time we shall give it a separate heading. It was very far, however, from attaining the excellence or observing the form which it afterwards assumed. The institution of the Academy led to various linguistic works. One of the earliest of these was the _Remarques_ of the Savoyard Claude Favre de Vaugelas (1595-1650), afterwards re-edited by Thomas Corneille. Pellisson wrote a history of the Academy itself when it had as yet but a brief one. The famous _Examen du Cid_ was an instance of the literary criticism of the time which was afterwards represented by Rene Rapin (1621-1687), Dominique Bouhours (1628-1702) and Rene de Bossu (1631-1680), while Adrien Baillet (1649-1706) has collected the largest thesaurus of the subject in his _Jugemens des savants_. Boileau set the example of treating such subjects in verse, and in the latter part of the century _Reflexions_, _Discourses_, _Observations_, and the like, on particular styles, literary forms and authors, became exceedingly numerous. In earlier years France possessed a numerous band of classical scholars of the first rank, such as Scaliger and Casaubon, who did not lack followers. But all or almost all this sort of work was done in Latin, so that it contributed little to French literature properly so-called, though the translations from the classics of Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt (1606-1664) have always taken rank among the models of French style. On the other hand, mathematical studies were pursued by persons of far other and far greater genius, and, taking from this time forward a considerable position in education and literature in France, had much influence on both. The mathematical discoveries of Pascal and Descartes are well known. Of science proper, apart from mathematics,