The taste of the age of Louis XV. affected to admire Corneille to the disadvantage of all other rivals, and Voltaire was not far from blaming Vauvenargues for his "extreme predilection" for Racine. But Vauvenargues, with unexpected vivacity, took up the cudgels, and accused the divine Corneille of "painting only the austere, stern, inflexible virtues," and of falling into the affectation of mistaking bravado for nobility, and declamation for eloquence. He is extremely severe on the faults of the favourite tragedian, and he blames Corneille for preferring the gigantic to the human, and for ignoring the tender and touching simplicity of the Greeks. It is from the point of view of the moralist that these strictures are now important; they show us that Vauvenargues in his reiterated recommendation of virtue and military glory did not regard those qualities from the Cornelian point of view, which he looked upon as fostering a pompous and falsely "fastueux" conception of life. He blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade. The publications of Vauvenargues during his lifetime come under two categories. His "Introduction a la Connaissance de l'Esprit Humain" is a short book, and it is also a fragment. The author had begun to collect notes for it during his Bohemian campaign, in 1741; but "those passions which are inseparable from youth, and ceaseless physical infirmity, brought on by the war, interrupted my studies," he says. Voltaire has expressed his amazement that under such piteous conditions, Vauvenargues had the fortitude to pursue them at all. There seems to be a change apparent in the object he put before him; he set out, like Locke, to write an essay on the Human Understanding, but he ended by putting together a chain of maxims. He quoted Pascal, who had said, "All good maxims are in the world; we have only got to apply them," but though Vauvenargues takes this dictum as his text he refutes it. He says that maxims originally "good," in Pascal's sense, may have grown sleepy in popular use, and may have ceased to act, so that we ought to rid ourselves of conventional prejudice and go to the fountain-head, to try all spirits, in fact, and find out what spirits really are of God. When Vauvenargues began to reflect, he was astonished at the inexactitude and even self-contradiction of the philosophical language of his day. He was not, and probably never would have become, what we understand now as a philosopher. He was a moralist, pure and simple, and had no more relation with men like Descartes or Berkeley than a rousing revivalist preacher has with a regius professor of Theology.