BOSSUET.--Bossuet is universally admitted to be the king of French orators; all his life he preached with a serious, imposing, vast, copious, and sonorous eloquence, fed from recollections of Holy Writ and of the Fathers, being insistent, convincing, and persuasive. His few funeral orations (on Henrietta of France, Henrietta of England, the Prince de Condé) are prose poems of glory, grief, and piety. He wrote against all those he regarded as enemies of true religion (_History of Variations_, _Quarrels of Quietness_), controversial works sparkling with irony and exalted eloquence. He traced in his _Universal History_ the great design in all its stages of God towards humanity and the world. He knew all the resources of the French language and of French style, and in his hands they were expanded. Despite his errors, which were those of his epoch, his date counts in the history of France as a great date, the date in which the religion to which he belonged reached its apogee and when the grand style of French prose was in its zenith. MADAME DE SÉVIGNÉ.--Madame de Sévigné only wrote letters to her friends; but they were so witty, lively, picturesque, admirable in aptly recounting the anecdotes of her day and in depicting the scenes and those concerned in them, written in a style so brisk and seductive, uniting the promise of 1630 with the harvest of 1670, that her work still remains one of the greatest favourites with people of literary taste. She was the friend of M. de la Rochefoucauld, of Cardinal de Retz, and of that amiable, refined, and gentle Mme. de la Fayette, whose novel, _The Princess of Cleves_, is still read with interest and emotion. LA BRUYÈRE.--La Bruyère translated and continued Theophrastus; he was a moralist, or rather a depicter of morals. He described the court, the town, and (very rarely) the village and the country. He was on the lookout for fools in order to be their scourge. He painted, or, better still, he engraved in an incisive way that was sharp, like aqua-fortis. Almost invariably bitter to an extreme, he sometimes had flashes of quite unexpected and very singular sensibility which make him beloved. Somewhat in imitation of La Rochefoucauld, but more particularly in conformity with his own nature, he developed a brief, concise, brusque style which became that of the moralist and even of the general author for the next fifty years, a style which was that of Montesquieu and Voltaire, and superseded the broad, sustained, balanced, harmonious, and measured style of the majority of the writers of the eighteenth century. In the field of ridicule, wherein he sowed copiously, more so even than Molière, the comic poets of the eighteenth century came to glean copiously, which did them less credit (for it is better to observe than to read) than it conferred on the wise and ingenious author of the _Characters_.