We are already in a position to appreciate d'Argenson as of a peculiarly complex nature; and its complexity is the more puzzling from the fact that the sterling ore of character is combined with traits, not of wickedness, but of weakness. He possesses in abundance those qualities which men love and admire; and yet we scarcely become intimately acquainted with him upon any single occasion without being tempted to laughter. The reason is only too clear. His real loftiness of spirit is yoked with a kind of halting timidity, with which the unhappy experience of his earlier years had afflicted him; and for such a man, to be sublime was too often to appear ridiculous. Occasionally amusement deepens to an even less pleasant feeling; for he held, and he had a right to hold, strong opinions upon men and things; and he sometimes records them in terms so unmeasured as to awaken sympathy with his unheard opponents and to arouse suspicion as regards himself. Moreover, he is himself so simply ingenuous as not to understand the necessity of discreet suppression; and he pursues, with painful circumstance, those moods of irritation, disappointment, disillusion, those momentary vices of temper, which all men perhaps are small enough to feel, but few are great enough to be able to record. Such failings might be taken for what they are worth--which is very little--were it not that, magnified out of all proportion by some of d'Argenson's most influential critics, they have been made the basis for conceptions of his character which are too ungenerous to be critically just. Faults they are, undoubtedly; but in reading, day after day, the revelations of his Journal, one feels that in this man, with all his failings, there is something verily great; and that morally, he towers above the ready cox-combs who laughed at him while he lived, or who have sneered at his memory when it alone remained.