Belloy, Laharpe, Ducis, and Marie Chénier? Eloquence, art, situations, correct verse, all exist in these except human nature; the personages are simply well-taught puppets, and generally mere mouthpieces by which the author makes his declamation public; Greeks, Romans, Medieval knights, Turks, Arabs, Peruvians, Giaours, or Byzantines, they have all the same declamatory mechanisms. The public, meanwhile, betrays no surprise. It is not aware of history. It assumes that humanity is everywhere the same. It establishes the success alike of the "Incas" by Marmontel, and of "Gonsalve" and the "Nouvelles" by Florian; also of the peasants, mechanics, Negroes, Brazilians, Parsees, and Malabarites that appear before it churning out their exaggerations. Man is simply regarded as a reasoning being, alike in all ages and alike in all places; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre endows his pariah with this habit, like Diderot, in his Tahitians. The one recognized principle is that every human being must think and talk like a book.--And how inadequate their historical background! With the exception of "Charles XII.," a contemporary on whom Voltaire, thanks to eye eye-witnesses, bestows fresh life, also his spirited sketches of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians and Germans, scattered through his stories, where are real persons to be found? With Hume, Gibbon and Robertson, belonging to the French school, and who are at once adopted in France, in the researches into our middle ages of Dubos and of Mably, in the "Louis XI" of Duclos, in the "Anarcharsis" of Barthélemy, even in the "Essai sur les Moeurs," and in the "Siecle de Louis XIV" of Voltaire, even in the "Grandeur des Romains," and the "Esprit des Lois" of Montesquieu, what peculiar deficiency! Erudition, criticism, common sense, an almost exact exposition of dogmas and of institutions, philosophic views of the relationships between events and on the general run of these, nothing is lacking but the people! On reading these it seems as if the climates, institutions and civilizations which so completely modifies the human intellect, are simply so many outworks, so many fortuitous exteriors, which, far from reflecting its depths scarcely penetrate beneath its surface. The vast differences separating the men of two centuries, or of two peoples, escape them entirely.[3235] The ancient Greek, the early Christian, the conquering Teuton, the feudal man, the Arab of Mahomet, the German, the Renaissance Englishman, the puritan, appear in their books as in engravings and frontispieces, with some difference in costume, but the same bodies, the same faces, the same countenances, toned down, obliterated, proper, adapted to the conventionalities of good manners. That sympathetic imagination by which the writer enters into the mind of another, and reproduces in himself a system of habits and feelings so different from his own, is the talent the most absent in the eighteenth century.