Horace pleases the intellect, but he does not charm the taste. Virgil satisfies the taste no less than the reflective faculty. It is as delightful to remember his verses as to read them. There is not in Horace a single turn, one might almost say a single word, that Virgil would have used, so different are their styles. Behind the thought of Pascal, we see the attitude of that firm and passionless intellect. This it is, more than all else, which makes him so imposing. Fenelon knows how to pray, but he does not know how to instruct We have in him a philosopher almost divine, and a theologian almost without knowledge. M. de Bausset says of Fenelon: "He loved men better than he knew them." Charmingly spoken; it is impossible to praise more wittily what one blames, or better to praise in the very act of blaming. The plan of Massillon's sermons is insignificant, but their bas-reliefs are superb. Montesquieu appears to teach the art of making empires; you seem to yourself to be learning it when you listen to him, and every time you read him you are tempted to go to work and construct one. Voltaire's judgment was correct, his imagination rich, his intellect agile, his taste lively, and his moral sense ruined. It is impossible for Voltaire to satisfy, and impossible for him not to please. In Voltaire, as in the monkey, the movements are charming and the features hideous. One always sees in him, at the end of a clever hand, an ugly face. That oratorical "authority" [weight of personal character] of which the ancients speak--you feel it in Bossuet more than in any other man; after him, in Pascal, in La Bruyere, in J. J. Rousseau even, but never in Voltaire. The style of Rousseau makes upon the soul the impression which the flesh of a lovely woman would make in touching us. There is something of the woman in his style. Racine and Boileau are not fountain-heads. A fine choice in imitation constitutes their merit. It is their books that imitate books, not their souls that imitate souls. Racine is the Virgil of the unlettered. Moliere is comic in cold blood. He provokes laughter and does not laugh. Herein lies his excellence. Bernardin [St. Pierre] writes by moonlight, Chateaubriand by sunlight. The quality of both writers is such that we seem simply to be making the transition from masculine to feminine in going, as now we do, from Joubert to Madame Swetchine. Madame SWETCHINE lives, and deserves to live, in French literature--for, though Russian, she wrote in French--by the incomparable exquisiteness of her personal, expressing itself in her literary, quality. Purest of pure was she, as in what she wrote, so in what she was. Through sympathetic contemporary description she makes an impression as of one of Fra Angelico's female saints released for a life from the fixed canonization of the canvas.