every folly and vice.  This despotism, while it was selfish and unwarrantable, still had in view the guardianship of morals and literature,—­to restrain men from crimes by working on their fears; but society, while it sought to free itself from hypocritical and oppressive leaders, also sought to remove all social and moral restraints, and to plunge into reckless and dangerous experiments.  It was a war between these two social powers,—­between unlawful despotism and unsanctified license.  We are to judge, not which was the better, but which was the worse.

One thing, however, is certain,—­that Madame de Pompadour, in whom was centred so much power, threw her influence against the Jesuits, and in favor of those who were not seeking to build up literature and morals on a sure and healthy foundation, but rather secretly and artfully to undermine the whole intellectual and social fabric, under the plea of liberty and human rights.  Everybody admits that the writings of the philosophers gave a great impulse to the revolutionary storm which afterwards broke out.  Ideas are ever most majestic, whether they are good or evil.  Men pass away, but principles are indestructible and of perpetual power.  As great and fearful agencies in the period we are contemplating, they are worthy of our notice.

Although the great lights which adorned the literature of the preceding reign no longer shone,—­such geniuses as Moliere, Boileau, Racine, Fenelon, Bossuet, Pascal, and others,—­still the eighteenth century was much more intellectual and inquiring than is generally supposed.  Under Louis XIV. intellectual independence had been nearly extinguished.  His reign was intellectually and spiritually a gloomy calm between two wonderful periods of agitation.  All acquiesced in his cold, heartless, rigid rule, being content to worship him as a deity, or absorbed in the excitements of his wars, or in the sorrows and burdens which those wars brought in their train.  But under Louis XV. the people began to meditate on the causes of their miseries, and to indulge in those speculations which stimulated their discontents or appealed to their intellectual pride.  Not from La Rochelle, not from the cells of Port Royal, not from remonstrating parliaments did the voices of rebellion come:  the genius of Revolution is not so poor as to be obliged to make use of the same class of instruments, or repeat the same experiments, in changing the great aspects of human society.  Nor will she allow, if possible, those who guard the fortresses which she wishes to batter down to be suspicious of her combatants.  Her warriors are ever disguised and masked, or else concealed within some form of a protecting deity, such as the fabled horse which the doomed Trojans received within their walls.  The court of France did not recognize in those plausible philosophers, whose writings had such a charm for cultivated intellect, the miners and sappers of the monarchy.  Only one class of