GREAT PROSE WRITERS.--The writers in prose of the second half of the seventeenth century are legion and but few fail to attain greatness. La Rochefoucauld, in his little volume of _Maxims_, enshrined thoughts that were often profound in a highly accurate and delicate setting. Cardinal de Retz narrated his tumultuous career in his _Memoirs_, which are strangely animated, vivid, and representative of what occurred. Arnauld and Nicole have explained their rigid Catholicism, which was Jansenism, in solid and luminous volumes; the latter, more especially, merits consideration and in his _Moral Essays_ proved an excellent writer. Mezeray, conscientious, laborious, circumstantial as well as capable writer, should be reckoned as the earliest French historian. Bourdaloue, sound logician and good moralist, from his pulpit as a preacher uttered discourses that were admirable, though too dogmatically composed, and painted word-pictures that piously satirised the types and the eccentrics of his day. Malebranche, reconsidering what Descartes had thought and revitalising his conclusions, arranged in his _Research after Truth_ a complete system of spiritualist and idealistic philosophy which he rendered clear, in spite of its depth, and extremely attractive owing to the merits of his powerful and facile imagination and of his rich, copious, and elastic style, that attained the happy mean between conversation and instruction. But five writers of the highest rank came into the perennial forefront, attracting and retaining general attention: Pascal, Bossuet, Mme. de Sévigné, La Bruyère, and Fénelon. PASCAL.--Pascal, a scholar and also by scientific education mathematician, geometrician, physician, turned, not to letters which he scorned, but to the exposition of those religious ideas which at the age of thirty-three were precious to him. To defend his friends the Jansenists against their foes the Jesuits, he wrote _The Provincial Letters_ (1656), which have often been regarded as the foremost monument of classic French prose; such is not our view, but they certainly form a masterpiece of argument, of dialectics, of irony, of humour, of eloquence, and are throughout couched in a magnificent style. Dying whilst still young, he left notes on various subjects, more particularly religion, philosophy, and morality, which have been collected under the title of _Thoughts_ and are the product of a great Christian philosopher, of a profound moralist, of a marvellously concise orator, and also of a poet who lacked neither acute sensitiveness nor vast and imposing imagination.