of the eighteenth century were composed; and of their principles of composition, so much more in harmony with the character of a people eminently intellectual, and finely alive to ridicule, but neither distinguished by high imagination, nor great depth or earnestness of feeling.
The task of tracing the literary history of that period, could hardly have fallen into the hands of a more candid critic than Villemain. While the influence of his age, and his familiarity with the better models of literature in other countries, have emancipated him from narrow views, taught him to value the old conventional rules of his country only at their true worth—that is to say, not as essentials applicable to all literature, but simply as convenient precepts suitable to the national taste—he is no warm partisan of the modern school of composition, no advocate of the more than Shakspearian license of plot, and the atrocities, eclipsing those of Massinger and Shirley, in which they indulge, and which often make the reader lay down the book with a feeling, in regard to the writer, similar to that of Alceste in the Misanthrope, "Qu'un homme est pendable après les avoir faits." His tastes, on the contrary, lean decidedly towards the simple, the natural, the kindly, and the elevated. Doing justice to many of Shakspeare's excellencies, it is yet evident that Villemain rejects the idea that Shakspeare's dramatic system can be placed on a level with that of the Greek dramatists, and, indeed, that he has much difficulty in bringing himself to admit that he has any system at all. And, accordingly, though he seems abundantly sensible of the nature, tenderness, and profundity of individual passages in Shakspeare; nay, is disposed to admit, occasionally, even his higher art in comparison with the French dramatists, as well as his deeper acquaintance with the human heart and human sympathies, his leaning, on the whole, seems to be towards the more stately, decorous, and well-ordered march of the tragedy of his own country, of which Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire are the great representatives. His work, therefore, though written on more enlarged and liberal principles than that of La Harpe, certainly breathes more of the rationalizing spirit of the first half of the eighteenth century, which it illustrates, than of the nineteenth, amidst the stormy influences of which it has been composed.
The genius of the seventeenth century had been formed under these different influences—a religious faith, strong, uniform, and undoubting; the spirit of reverence for antiquity; and the pomp and circumstance of a tranquil and imposing monarchy. It wore an aspect, accordingly, of dignity, outward moral propriety, and good sense, rather than depth of thinking, conveyed in the garb of a pure simple expression so far as regarded style. It is expressed in its most attractive form, either in the pointed neatness of Boileau, or in the drama, which had been raised at once from infancy to manhood by the vigorous and original genius of Corneille, and which received the last polish and grace of which its artificial and rhetorical form was susceptible, from the delicacy and tenderness of Racine.
The dominant influences, on the contrary, under which the literature of the eighteenth century may be said to have grown into shape, are a sceptical philosophy, the imitation of foreign literature, and the mania for political reform. Some traces of the sceptical spirit of a later period, may indeed be traced even among the contemporaries of Bossuet, in the extensive erudition of Bayle, combined with a spirit of mockery and universal doubt, which labours to reduce the most opposite opinions, as to facts or doctrines, to an equilibrium; and whose multifarious researches afforded to his successors, at an easy rate, a storehouse of learning, which was turned to ample account when the crusade against established opinions was commenced in earnest by the authors of the Encyclopédie. Still, when Louis XIV., the survivor of almost every great man who had illustrated his court or his reign, died, on the 1st September 1715, the general characteristics of French literature were reverence for religion, loyalty to the throne, a pride in the extensive influence of France over other nations, which was justified both by her political ascendency, and by the adoption of her critical views and the imitation of her great writers; and a complacent satisfaction with the present, which rendered men compa-
