Pierre, in which the notion of a “return to nature” is the dominant note. St. Pierre was the disciple; Rousseau is the master, who, whether in the novel or in his _Confessions_, is the first writer in modern Europe to expatiate upon inanimate nature in connection with the feelings. How much of the “nature-worship” of Wordsworth and his age may be due to this example from France can hardly be estimated, but the name of Rousseau was a familiar one in England, and by him was sown much of the seed which our own revivalists watered. Passing over the letter-writers and minor essayists, we come to the thinkers, the propagators of freedom of thought, commonly known as the _philosophes_. In this case the impulse came from the English Locke and from contact with, and personal observation of, the liberal circumstances of England, at that time the most advanced in Europe. The crop of French solvent ideas from these sources soon found its way back to our own country. In his _Esprit des Lois_, Montesquieu, a writer of remarkable wisdom, examines the natural basis and evolution of law and custom; the fertile but superficial Voltaire, in various “Letters” and essays, lends his powerful wit to the weakening of accepted authority, especially in religion. Subsequently, in order to crystallize the knowledge which forms the necessary basis to right criticism and reformation, there was undertaken the famous, if not very successful, _Encyclopaedia_, or _Dictionnaire Raisonné_ of sciences and arts, under the direction of Diderot and D’Alembert. Falling into the revolutionary current, and being in direct association with the _philosophes_ and Encyclopaedists, the eloquent and passionate Rousseau produced the _Contrat Social_, with its doctrines of equality and fraternity and its innovating theories of education, and the _Confessions_, in which he lays bare his own pettinesses, but with exquisite literary skill. As his follower must be reckoned Chateaubriand, who, so far as expression of temperament goes, passed on his mantle to the English Byron. If now it is asked on what groups of our English writers French influence is most pronounced and obvious, we should most safely reply that in pre-Renaissance times we must name Chaucer and Gower; then, after a gap of two hundred and fifty years, we may begin once more with Dryden and his contemporaries, the poetic “roisterers,” Dorset and Roscommon, and the comedians Congreve, Wycherley, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh. In Pope and all his school the influence is manifest and conscious. It is present in Addison and Steele, and in the novelists Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, different as they are; in the letters of Walpole and Chesterfield, and, in more or less measure, consciously and unconsciously, in all the writers of poetry, drama, letters, essays, journals and novels from about the year 1660 for a whole century.