The seventeenth century in France is covered with prose-writers of clear reasoning power, pinnacled in Descartes’ _Discours de la Méthode_ and Pascal’s _Provincial Letters_, and with writers of essays, memoirs, novels, letters, criticisms, character-sketches, and “maxims” in all their various kinds. There is the _essai_, which enlarges on a theme; the _conversation_, an essay in dialogue, like those of Landor; the _pensée_, a miniature essay with narrower theme; and the _maxime_, a pithy sentence forming the cream of a _pensée_. La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and St. Evremond, for example, are familiar names. For our purpose it is enough that these writers preceded our own Addison, Swift, Steele, and Johnson, and that English prose of the Queen Anne period and the earlier eighteenth century was fashioned by France as much as was our verse itself. And as the excellence of prose is perfect clearness and ease, the influence of France herein was wholly good, just as the prosaic influence of its verse had been mainly harmful. In the same century stands, _sui generis_, La Fontaine, the fertile author of the famous stories and _Fables_, to whom Dryden, Gay, and Prior owe, besides the hint of form, no little suggestion. * * * * * In the eighteenth century French literature is of an inferior order, unproductive of things noble in imagination or of great dramatic works. At its best it is critical, not creative. Until André Chénier at the end of the century, it has practically no poetry to show, since neither the occasional verses of Voltaire, nor his epic _Henriade_, nor his drama _Zaïre_, can properly bear the name. Wit indeed flourished in the epigrams and comedy of Piron, as it could hardly fail to do in French work of the lighter kinds; but it was not till the precursors of the “Romantic movement” of the nineteenth century—for which France was almost as much indebted to the English Byron and the German Goethe as to its own Rousseau and Chateaubriand—that creative poetry appears again with Béranger and Lamartine. The Romantic epoch itself is then embodied in Victor Hugo. So far as the eighteenth century is productive, it is in prose, and chiefly the prose of thought and science. The novel is represented in the picaresque _Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_ of Lesage early in the century, in the analytical _Marianne_ of Marivaux, in the satirically destructive _Candide_ of Voltaire, in the powerful character study of _Manon Lescaut_ by Prévost, in the sentimental and picturesque _Nouvelle Héloïse_ of Rousseau and _Paul et Virginie_ of Bernardin de St. Pierre, and in the social fiction of Madame de Staël. Of the effect of Lesage upon England we have already spoken. Marivaux appears to have distinctly influenced Richardson, whose _Pamela_ otherwise bears a strange similarity to _Marianne_. But most congenial to the English mind, now on its way to the Romantic revolt, was the work of Rousseau and St.