"I did not wish to give them to understand," says Alfieri, refusing an embassy, "that their diplomacy and their dispatches seemed to me and certainly were for me less important than my tragedies or even those of others; but it is impossible to reclaim that kind of people: they cannot and must not be converted." [Sidenote: Other literary diplomatists.] Who in France was ever more literary than L'Hôpital[105], the reversioner of Horace, than d'Ossat[106], that capable ambassador, than Richelieu, that great head, who, not content with dictating "controversial treaties," with writing "Memoirs," and "histories," constantly invented dramatic subjects, and rhymed with Mailleville and Boisrobert[107], and gave birth, by the sweat of his brow, to the Academy[108] and the _Grande Pastorale?_[109] Is it because he was a bad writer that he was a great minister? But the question is not one of the possession of more or less talent; it is one of the passion for paper and ink: and M. de L'Empyrée[110] never showed more ardour nor incurred greater expense than did the cardinal to snatch the palm from Parnassus, seeing that the staging of his "tragi-comedy" of _Mirame_ cost him two hundred thousand crowns! If, in one who is both a political and a literary personage, the mediocrity of a poet caused the superiority of the statesmen, one would have thence to conclude that the weakness of the statesman would result from the strength of the poet: yet did the literary genius destroy the political genius of Solon[111], an elegist equal to Simonides[112]; of Pericles stealing from the Muses the eloquence with which he subjugated the Athenians; of Thucydides[113] and Demosthenes[114], who carried to so great a height the glory of the writer and the orator, while devoting their days to war and the public places? Did it destroy the genius of Xenophon[115], who effected the retreat of the ten thousand while dreaming of the _Cyropœdia_; of the two Scipios[116], one the friend of Lælius[117], the other associated in the fame of Terence[118]; of Cicero[119], king of letters, as he was the father of the country; of Cæsar[120], lastly, author of works of grammar, astronomy, religion, literature, of Cæsar, rival of Archilochus[121] in satire, of Sophocles[122] in tragedy, of Demosthenes in eloquence, whose _Commentaries_ are the despair of historians? In spite of these examples and a thousand others, literary talent, which is very eminently the first of all, because it excludes no other faculty, will always in this country be an obstacle to political success. Of what use, indeed, is a high intelligence? It serves no purpose whatever. The block-heads of France, a special and wholly national type, grant nothing to the Grotiuses, the Frederics, the Bacons[123], the Thomas Mores[124], the Spensers[125], the Falklands[126], the Clarendons[127], the Bolingbrokes[128], the Burkes and the Cannings of France[129]. [Sidenote: Envy of the common herd.]