he study of society, philosophical speculation, the criticism of religion, of government, and of social arrangements. The old basis of belief upon which reposed the great art of the

n admirable instrument for the intellect, but was less apt to render sensations and passions; when employed for the loftier purposes of art it tended to the oratorical, with something of over-emphasis

court of Charles II. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1670-1741), who in the days of Mme. de Maintenon's authority had in his sacred Cantates been pious by command, recompensed himself by retailing unbecoming epigrams-and for epigram he had a genuine gift-to the Society of the Temple. He manufactured odes with skill in the mechanism of verse, and carefully secured the fine disorder required in that form of art by factitious enthusiasm and the

ye not on the object but on the page of the Encyclop?dia, and to avoid the indecency of naming anything in direct and simple speech. The Seasons of Saint-Lambert were followed by the Months (Mois) of Roucher (1745-94)-"the most beautiful poetic shipwreck of the century," said the malicious Rivarol-and by the Jardins of Delille (1738-1813). When Delille translated the Georgics he was saluted by Voltaire as the Abbé Virgil.1 The salons heard him with rapture recite his verses as from the trip

s Rivarol's

which gives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if he often falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It was not the great lyric but le petit lyrisme which blossomed and ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely frivolous or merely depraved. Grécourt; Piron; Bernard, the

inage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and the society whi

ve us a measure of his range and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenth century wrote in pro