still bubbling up.  In literature as well as in the state, one and the same need of discipline and unity, one universal thirst for order and peace was bringing together all the intellects and all the forces which were but lately clashing against and hampering one another; in literature, as well as in the state, the impulse, everywhere great and effective, proceeded from the king, without pressure or effort.  “Make known to Monsieur de Geneve,” said Henry IV. to one of the friends of St. Francis de Sales, “that I desire of him a work to serve as a manual for all persons of the court and the great world, without excepting kings and princes, to fit them for living Christianly each according to their condition.  I want this manual to be accurate, judicious, and such as any one can make use of.”  St. Francis de Sales published, in 1608, the Introduction to a Devout Life, a delightful and charming manual of devotion, more stern and firm in spirit than in form, a true Christian regimen softened by the tact of a delicate and acute intellect, knowing the world and its ways.  “The book has surpassed my hope,” said Henry IV.  The style is as supple, the fancy as rich, as Montaigne’s; but scepticism has given place to Christianism; St. Francis de Sales does not doubt, he believes; ingenious and moderate withal, he escapes out of the controversies of the violent and the incertitudes of the sceptics.  The step is firm, the march is onward towards the seventeenth century, towards the reign of order, rule, and method.

The vigorous language and the beautiful arrangement in the style of the magistrates had already prepared the way for its advent.  Descartes was the first master of it and its great exponent.

[Illustration:  Descartes at Amsterdam——­316]

Never was any mind more independent in voluntary submission to an inexorable logic.  Rene Descartes, who was born at La Haye, near Tours, in 1596, and died at Stockholm in 1650, escaped the influence of Richelieu by the isolation to which he condemned himself, as well as by the proud and somewhat uncouth independence of his character.  Engaging as a volunteer, at one and twenty, in the Dutch army, he marched over Germany in the service of several princes, returned to France, where he sold his property, travelled through the whole of Italy, and ended, in 1629, by settling himself in Holland, seeking everywhere solitude and room for his thoughts.  “In this great city of Amsterdam, where I am now,” he wrote to Balzac, “and where there is not a soul, except myself, that does not follow some commercial pursuit, everybody is so attentive to his gains, that I might live there all my life without being noticed by anybody.  I go walking every day amidst the confusion of a great people with as much freedom and quiet as you could do in your forest-alleys, and I pay no more attention to the people who pass before my eyes than I should do to the trees that are in your forests and