[Footnote 18: The writings of Vauvenargues exist in a confusion which is not likely to be ever remedied, for the bulk of his MSS. were burned during the Commune in May 1871. But much gratitude is owing to Suard (1806) and Gilbert (1857) for their pious labours. A variorum edition might even yet be attempted, and although not complete, might at least be final.] In considering the observations of Vauvenargues with regard to poets, we must bear in mind that he and his contemporaries did not seek from poetry what we require in the twentieth century. The critics of the early eighteenth century in France talked about Homer and Virgil, but what they really admired were Ariosto and Pope. Voltaire, the greatest of them, considered the "epopee heroi-comique" the top-stone of modern practical effort; we know what astonishing feats he was himself guilty of in that species of architecture. But his whole teaching and practice tended towards an identity of speech between prose and verse, the prosodical pattern or ornament being the sole feature which distinguished the latter from the former. His own poetry, when it was not fugitive or satiric, was mainly philosophical, that is to say, it did not stray beyond the confines of logic and wit. At the same time, Voltaire was an energetic protagonist for verse, and he did very much to prevent the abandonment of this instrument at a time when prose, in such hands as those of Montesquieu and Buffon, was manifestly in the ascendant. He earnestly recommended the cultivation of a form in which precision of thought and elegance of language were indispensable, and he employed it in tragedies which we find it impossible to read, but which enchanted the ear and fancy of Vauvenargues.