powers of the first order, were for the first time made the mainspring of literary interest, and thereby set an example which for more than a century has been persistently followed, and which has produced some of the finest results of modern literature. The first of these was the elaborate and unsparing analysis and display of the motives, the weaknesses and the failings of individual character. This process, which Rousseau unflinchingly performed on himself, has been followed usually in respect to fictitious characters by his successors. The other novelty was the feeling for natural beauty and the elaborate description of it, the credit of which latter must, it has been agreed by all impartial critics, be assigned rather to Rousseau than to any other writer. His influence in this direction was, however, soon taken up and continued by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, the connecting link between Rousseau and Chateaubriand, some of whose works have been already alluded to. In particular the author of _Paul et Virginie_ set himself to develop the example of description which Rousseau had set, and his word-paintings, though less powerful than those of his model, are more abundant, more elaborate, and animated by a more amiable spirit. Condillac. _18th-Century Philosophy._--The Anglomania which distinguished the time was nowhere more strongly shown than in the cast and direction of its philosophical speculations. As Montesquieu and Voltaire had imported into France a vivid theoretical admiration for the British constitution and for British theories in politics, so Voltaire, Diderot and a crowd of others popularized and continued in France the philosophical ideas of Hobbes and Locke and even Berkeley, the theological ideas of Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury and the English deists, and the physical discoveries of Newton. Descartes, Frenchman and genius as he was, and though his principles in physics and philosophy were long clung to in the schools, was completely abandoned by the more adventurous and progressive spirits. At no time indeed, owing to the confusion of thought and purpose to which we have already alluded, was the word philosophy used with greater looseness than at this time. Using it, as we have hitherto used it, in the sense of metaphysics, the majority of the Philosophes have very little claim to their title. There were some who manifested, however, an aptitude for purely philosophical argument, and one who confined himself strictly thereto. Among these the most remarkable are Julien Offroy de la Mettrie (1709-1751) and Denis Diderot. La Mettrie in his works _L'Homme machine_, _L'Homme plante_, &c., applied a lively and vigorous imagination, a considerable familiarity with physics and medicine, and a brilliant but unequal style, to the task of advocating materialistic ideas on the constitution of man. Diderot, in a series of early works, _Lettre sur les aveugles_, _Promenade d'un sceptique_, _Pensees philosophiques_, &c., exhibited a