anti-Christian literature was composed and set afloat. The characteristic work of this school, its last word indeed, is the famous _Systeme de la nature_, attributed to Holbach (1723-1789), but known to be, in part at least, the work of Diderot. In this remarkable work, which caps the climax of the metaphysical materialism or rather nihilism of the century, the atheistic position is clearly put. It made an immense sensation; and it so fluttered not merely the orthodox but the more moderate freethinkers, that Frederick of Prussia and Voltaire, perhaps the most singular pair of defenders that orthodoxy ever had, actually set themselves to refute it. Its style and argument are very unequal, as books written in collaboration are apt to be, and especially books in which Diderot, the paragon of inequality, had a hand. But there is an almost entire absence of the heterogeneous assemblage of anecdotes, jokes good and bad, scraps of accurate or inaccurate physical science, and other incongruous matter with which the Philosophes were wont to stuff their works; and lastly, there is in the best passages a kind of sombre grandeur which recalls the manner as well as the matter of Lucretius. It is perhaps well to repeat, in the case of so notorious a book, that this criticism is of a purely literary and formal character; but there is little doubt that the literary merits of the work considerably assisted its didactic influence. As the Revolution approached, and the victory of the Philosophe party was declared, there appeared for a brief space a group of cynical and accomplished phrase-makers presenting some similarity to that of which, a hundred years before, Saint-Evremond was the most prominent figure. The chief of this group were Nicolas Chamfort (1747-1794) on the republican side, and Antoine Rivarol (1753-1801) on that of the royalists. Like the older writer to whom we have compared them, neither can be said to have produced any one work of eminence, and in this they stand distinguished from moralists like La Rochefoucauld. The floating sayings, however, which are attributed to them, or which occur here and there in their miscellaneous work, yield in no respect to those of the most famous of their predecessors in wit and a certain kind of wisdom, though they are frequently more personal than aphoristic. Helvetius. Thomas. Vauvenargues.