But let us be entirely frank. The "Provincial Letters" of Pascal are now, to the general reader, not so interesting as from their fame one would seem entitled to expect. You cannot read them intelligently without considerable previous study. You need to have learned, imperfectly, with labor, a thousand things that every contemporary reader of Pascal perfectly knew as if by simply breathing--the necessary knowledge being then, so to speak, abroad in the air. Even thus you cannot possibly derive that vivid delight from perusing in bulk the "Provincial Letters" now, which the successive numbers of the series, appearing at brief irregular intervals, communicated to the eagerly expecting French public, at a time when the topics discussed were topics of a present and pressing practical interest. Still, with whatever disadvantage unavoidably attending, we must give our readers a taste of the quality of Pascal's "Provincial Letters." We select a passage at the commencement of the "Seventh Letter." We use the translation of Mr. Thomas M'Crie. This succeeds very well in conveying the sense, though it necessarily fails to convey either the vivacity or the eloquence, of the incomparable original. The first occasion of the "Provincial Letters" was a championship proposed to Pascal to be taken up by him on behalf of his beleaguered and endangered friend Arnauld, the Port-Royalist. (Port Royal was a Roman Catholic abbey situated some eight miles to the south-west of Versailles, and therefore not very remote from Paris.) Arnauld was "for substance of doctrine" really a Calvinist, though he quite sincerely disclaimed being such; and it was for his defense of Calvinism (under its ancient form of Augustinianism) that he was threatened, through Jesuit enmity, with condemnation for heretical opinion. The problem was to enlist the sentiment of general society in his favor. The friends in council at Port Royal said to Pascal, "You must do this." Pascal said, "I will try." In a few days the first letter of a series destined to such fame was submitted for judgment to Port Royal, and approved. It was printed--anonymously. The success was instantaneous and brilliant. A second letter followed, and a third. Soon, from strict personal defense of Arnauld, the writer went on to take up a line of offense and aggression. He carried the war into Africa. He attacked the Jesuits as teachers of immoral doctrine. The plan of these later letters was to have a Paris gentleman write to a friend of his in the country (the "provincial"), detailing interviews held by him with a Jesuit priest of the city. The supposed Parisian gentleman in his interviews with the supposed Jesuit father affects the air of a very simple-hearted seeker after truth. He represents himself as, by his innocent-seeming docility, leading his Jesuit teacher on to make the most astonishingly frank exposures of the secrets of the casuistical system held and taught by his order.