Men often disown these supreme masters; they rebel against them; they reckon up their faults: they accuse them of tediousness, of length, of extravagance, of bad taste, what time they plunder them and deck themselves in their spoils; but they struggle in vain against their yoke. Everything wears their colours; they have left their traces everywhere; they invent words and names which go to swell the general vocabulary of the nations; their expressions become proverbs, their fictitious characters change into real characters, with heirs and a lineage. They open out horizons whence burst forth sheaves of light; they sow ideas, the germs of a thousand others; they supply all the arts with imaginations, subjects, styles: their works are the mines or the bowels of the human mind. These geniuses occupy the first rank; their vastness, their variety, their fruitfulness, their originality cause them to be accepted from the very first as laws, models, moulds, types of the various forms of intellect, even as there are four or five races of men issuing from one single stock, of which the others are only branches. Let us take care how we insult the disorders into which these mighty beings sometimes fall: let us not imitate Ham, the accursed; let us not laugh if we see the sole and solitary mariner of the deep lying naked and asleep, in the shadow of the Ark resting upon the mountains of Armenia. Let us respect that diluvial navigator, who recommenced the Creation after the flood-gates of Heaven were shut up: let us, as pious children, blessed by our father, modestly cover him with our cloak. Shakespeare, in his lifetime, never thought of living after his life: what signifies to him to-day my hymn of admiration? Admitting every supposition, reasoning from the truths or falsehoods with which the human mind is penetrated or imbued, what cares Shakespeare for a renown of which the sound cannot rise to where he is? A Christian? In the midst of eternal bliss, does he think of the nothingness of the world? A deist? Freed from the shades of matter, lost in the splendours of God, does he cast down a look upon the grain of sand over which he passed? An atheist? He sleeps the sleep without breathing or awakening which we call death. Nothing therefore is vainer than glory beyond the tomb, unless it have kept friendship alive, unless it have been useful to virtue, helpful to misfortune, unless it be granted to us to rejoice in Heaven in a consoling, generous, liberating idea left behind by us upon earth. * [Sidenote: Samuel Richardson.] Novels, at the end of the last century, had been included in the general proscription. Richardson[277] slept forgotten: his fellow-countrymen discovered in his style traces of the inferior society in which he had spent his life. Fielding[278] maintained his success; Sterne[279], the purveyor of eccentricity, was out of date. The _Vicar of Wakefield_ was still read[280].