This word is used in romances, poetry, and above all, in operas, to express the severity of female modesty. We meet with vain _fierté_, vigorous _fierté_, etc. Poets are, perhaps, more in the right than they imagine. The _fierté_ of a woman is not only rigid modesty and love of duty, but the high value which she sets upon her beauty. The _fierté_ of the pencil is sometimes spoken of to signify free and fearless touches. FIGURE. Every one desirous of instruction should read with attention all the articles in the "_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_," under the head "Figure," viz.: "Figure of the Earth," by M. d'Alembert--a work both clear and profound, in which we find all that can be known on the subject. "Figure of Rhetoric," by César Dumarsais--a piece of instruction which teaches at once to think and to write; and, like many other articles, make us regret that young people in general have not a convenient opportunity of reading things so useful. "Human Figure," as relating to painting and sculpture--an excellent lesson given to every artist, by M. Watelet. "Figure," in physiology--a very ingenious article, by M. de Caberoles. "Figure," in arithmetic and in algebra--by M. Mallet. "Figure," in logic, in metaphysics, and in polite literature, by M. le Chevalier de Jaucourt--a man superior to the philosophers of antiquity, inasmuch as he has preferred retirement, real philosophy, and indefatigable labor, to all the advantages that his birth might have procured him, in a country where birth is set above all beside, excepting money. _Figure or Form of the Earth._ Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Posidonius, and all the geometricians of Asia, of Egypt, and of Greece, having acknowledged the sphericity of our globe, how did it happen that we, for so long a time, imagined that the earth was a third longer than it was broad, and thence derived the terms "_longitude_" and "_latitude_," which continually bear testimony to our ancient ignorance? The reverence due to the "Bible," which teaches us so many truths more necessary and more sublime, was the cause of this, our almost universal error. It had been found, in Psalm ciii, that God had stretched the heavens over the earth like a skin; and as a skin is commonly longer than it is wide, the same was concluded of the earth. St. Athanasius expresses himself as warmly against good astronomers as against the partisans of Arius and Eusebius. "Let us," says he, "stop the mouths of those barbarians, who, speaking without proof, dare to assert that the heavens also extend under the earth." The fathers considered the earth as a great ship, surrounded by water, with the prow to the east, and the stern to the west. We still find, in "Cosmos," a work of the fourth century, a sort of geographical chart, in which the earth has this figure.