We come now to that nineteenth-century group, foreshadowed on an earlier page, of French _pensee_-writers. The longer lapse of time in JOUBERT'S case, constantly confirming his claim to be a true classic, justifies us in placing, as we do, his name not only first but principal in the title to the present chapter. Joseph Joubert presents the singular case of a man of letters living to a good old age, whose published literary work, and, therefore, whose literary fame, are wholly posthumous. He left behind him more than two hundred blank books filled with notes of thoughts which were to constitute after he died his title to enduring remembrance. Everything important surviving from his pen exists in the form of what the French call _pensees_. The sense of this word one of Joubert's own _pensees_ very well expresses: I should like to convert wisdom into coin, that is, mint it into _maxims_, into _proverbs_, into _sentences_, easy to keep and to circulate. Another of his _pensees_ confesses, perhaps we should say rather, professes, what the ambition was that this most patient of writers indulged with reference to the literary form of his work: If there exists a man tormented by the accursed ambition of putting a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word, that man is myself. Joubert was a natural unchangeable classicist in taste and spirit. The Periclean age of Greece, the Augustan age of Rome, the "great age" of France, that of Louis XIV., supplied Joubert with most of the books that fed his mind. He remained distinctively Christian in creed, though not nicely orthodox according to any accepted standard. Like so many of his literary compatriots, Joubert owed a great debt, for intellectual quickening, shaping, and refining, to brilliant and beautiful women. We show a few, too few, specimens that may indicate this gifted Frenchman's rare and precious quality: Religion is a fire to which example furnishes fuel, and which goes out if it does not spread. The Bible is to the religions [of mankind], what the Iliad is to poetry. A comparison, the latter foregoing, however faulty by defect we may justly esteem it, loyally designed, of course, by the author to render profound homage to the Bible. Only just the right proportion of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little too much is allowable. We may convince others by our arguments; but we can persuade them only by their own. Frankness is a natural quality; constant veracity is a virtue. In pondering such golden sentences, one is constantly incited to make maxims one's self; which, indeed, is a part of the value of this kind of literature. Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.