1675, and often reprinted afterwards. Its leading doctrine is that the subject should be chosen before the characters, and that the action should be arranged without reference to the personages who are to figure in the scene. Boileau, in his Third Reflexion on Longinus, pronounced this work "l'un des meilleurs livres de poétique qui, du consentemeut de tous les habiles gens, aient été faits en nôtre langue." It may be mentioned, however, that Bossu is said to have defended Boileau against Saint-Sorlin, and to have received his thanks for that service; and a sense of obligation may perhaps have dictated the commendation which Boileau bestowed on the work. Bossu died March 14, 1680.
BOSSUET, Jacques Bénigne, the celebrated orator and prelate, was born at Dijon, within a short distance of the cathedral, on the 27th September 1627. He was the fifth son of Bénigne Bossuet and Madeleine Mochette. The family of which he came, though of bourgeois rank, had long taken an honourable part in the public and official life of Burgundy. He was destined from infancy for the church, and grew up amid influences eminently favourable to the unfolding of his powers, for, although at six years of age, on his father's appointment to be president in the parliament of Metz, he was left at Dijon, yet his education had been wisely confided to an uncle, Claude Bossuet, a large-hearted man, ardently devoted to literature, whose delight it was to foster his nephew's intellectual gifts. These soon gave token of exceptional brilliancy, and in the Jesuits College, where he went to school, he distanced all competitors in the facility with which he mastered the Greek and Latin classics, Virgil and Homer being his especial favourites, for whose writings he contracted an unalterable attachment, just as Horace became the life-long companion of his rival Fénélon. It was from a higher source, however, that Bossuet's genius, which was essentially of the Hebrew type, caught its finest inspiration; and one day reading a Bible left open by accident at the prophecies of Isaiah, he was so thrilled by their poetry that thenceforth he became virtually "a man of one book," and in Holy Scripture, read and re-read until learned ultimately almost by heart, he found the field in which his mind could best expatiate and gather light and power. In Bossuet, says Lamartine, the Bible was transfused into a man. With that keen-sighted appreciation of talent which they uniformly display, the Jesuits sought to enlist him in their order, but family influence being against the proposal, in 1642 he was sent to Paris; nor could the circumstances of his arrival there fail profoundly to impress the fervid imagination of the boy, for it chanced to be on the very day on which Richelieu, then near his end, was borne into the city in a splendid movable chamber, at the close of the vengeance-taking campaign, which terminated in the execution of De Thon. Bossuet entered the college of Navarre, the oldest in the University, where, under Nicholas Cornet, the presiding genius of the place, and in midst of the intellectual quickening imparted to it in common with the whole of learned Europe by the new philosophy of Descartes, he achieved distinction in every department except mathematics, for which he seems to have possessed neither the taste nor the faculty. At sixteen his attainments were the talk of the town. He became the pet of the lettered aristocracy of Paris, and it argues his strength of character that he was unspoiled by their caresses. The applause which greeted the delivery of his thesis for the bachelor's degree encouraged him to perfect his superb oratorical gifts, nor did he count it unlawful then to be a frequent spectator when the chefs-d'œuvres of Corneille were played, although, later, he was not sparing in his criticism of the stage. At twenty-four he was appointed archdeacon of Metz. In Lent 1652, after a season of retreat at St Lazare, he received priest's orders, and immediately quitted the gay capital, and the career already opening to him there, to fulfil the duties awaiting him in the comparative obscurity of the provinces. Six years were spent in unwearied pastoral activity, as well as in exhaustive private study of Scripture and of the Fathers, notably St Augustine, although even in the less read Patristic writings he was at home, and quickly put his knowledge to use in a work of controversy, entitled Refutation du Catechisme de Paul Ferry, a Protestant minister of Metz. It is of interest principally because it outlines even at that early date the doctrine afterwards vigorously defended by Bossuet of the limited authority of the popes in matters of faith. The echo of his pulpit eloquence had already begun to reach beyond Lorraine; during a short residence at Metz it fascinated Anne of Austria, the Queen Mother, and for the next ten years (1659-69) he was in perpetual request in the metropolis. Wherever he appeared court and city flocked to listen; the queens went from the palace and the nuns of Port Royal from their seclusion; Condé, Turenne, Madame de Sevigné, and other famous contemporaries mingled with the crowd; while, in 1662, the preacher's triumph reached a climax, when after hearing him for the first time at the Louvre, Louis XIV., in a moment of rarely awakened enthusiasm, despatched a royal message to Bossuet's father—"pour le feliciter d'avoir un tel fils."
According to Lachet, these matchless discourses may be classified as belonging to three periods:—that of Metz, showing a considerable measure of crudeness both of thought and expression; that of Paris, distinguished by strength and splendour (for, as Sainte-Beuve observes, every trace of immaturity or questionable taste disappears from the moment when Bossuet enters the circle of the king's influence); and that of Meaux, in which faultless grace of composition is purchased at the expense of vigour. On ordinary occasions, and for an audience that loved the practical truths of religion marshalled with logical force and distinctness, Bourdaloue was, perhaps, equally attractive as a preacher—there is even more contemporary talk about him; but in the Oraisons Funèbres Bossuet is unapproachable. In this species of oratory Mascaron and Flechier had preceded him, but he is the veritable creator of it, and nowhere does his genius take such wing as at the grave's mouth, when, recounting the virtues of the illustrious dead, he pictures, with wonderful sweep of imagination and mastery of detail, the historical events and personages of the epoch in which they lived, the more impressively to demonstrate that all earthly pomp and renown "are shadows, not substantial things." Not that he altogether escapes the vice of the French pulpit of that age, for occasionally he does elevate into types of excellence those who fell far short of it; but, as compared with other offenders, the adulation which he offers is, even in the hearing of royalty, measured and temperate. His funeral orations at the death of Henrietta of England, of her daughter, the duchess of Orleans, and of the great Condé, are commonly deemed his finest efforts of the kind.
In 1669 Bossuet was appointed to the diocese of Condom, and in the year following he became preceptor to the Dauphin; but being unable, in conscience, to retain both offices he resigned the former, and, in consideration of the pecuniary sacrifice involved, obtained the revenues of the Abbey of St Lucien at Beauvais. Convinced that on the culture of the Dauphin might depend the future welfare of the French people, he threw himself with ircredible energy into the novel duties of the preceptorship, and resumed his own education the better to educate his august but indolent pupil. He lacked that sweetness of nature, however, which afterwards gave to Fénélon such sway over the Dauphin's son. For the edification of his royal charge Bossuet wrote several able works, such as
