“When the people is in a state of agitation, we do
  not see how quiet is to return; and when it is tranquil,
  we do not see how the quiet is to be disturbed.”

“Men count for almost nothing the virtues of the heart, and idolise gifts of body or intellect.  The man who quite coolly, and with no idea that he is offending modesty, says that he is kind-hearted, constant, faithful, sincere, fair, grateful, would not dare to say that he is quick and clever, that he has fine teeth and a delicate skin.”

I will say nothing of Rivarol, a caustic wit of the revolutionary time, nor of Joubert, a writer of sayings of this century, of whom Mr. Matthew Arnold has said all that needs saying.  He is delicate, refined, acute, but his thoughts were fostered in the hothouse of a coterie, and have none of the salt and sapid flavour that comes to more masculine spirits from active contact with the world.

I should prefer to close this survey in the sunnier moral climate of Vauvenargues.  His own life was a pathetic failure in all the aims of outer circumstance.  The chances of fortune and of health persistently baulked him, but from each stroke he rose up again, with undimmed serenity and undaunted spirit.  As blow fell upon blow, the sufferer hold, firmly to his incessant lesson,—­Be brave, persevere in the fight, struggle on, do not let go, think magnanimously of man and life, for man is good and life is affluent and fruitful.  He died a hundred and forty years ago, leaving a little body of maxims behind him which, for tenderness, equanimity, cheerfulness, grace, sobriety, and hope, are not surpassed in prose literature.  “One of the noblest qualities in our nature,” he said, “is that we are able so easily to dispense with greater perfection.”

  “Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its
  motives.”

  “To do great things a man must live as though he
  had never to die.”

  “The first days of spring have less grace than the
  growing virtue of a young man.”

  “You must rouse in men a consciousness of their
  own prudence and strength if you would raise their
  character.”

Just as Tocqueville said:  “He who despises mankind will never get the best out of either others or himself."[1]

[Footnote 1:  The reader who cares to know more about Vauvenargues will find a chapter on him in the present writer’s Miscellanies, vol. ii.]

The best known of Vauvenargues’ sayings, as it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far-reaching sentence already quoted, that “Great thoughts come from the heart.”  And this is the truth that shines out as we watch the voyagings of humanity from the “wide, grey, lampless depths” of time.  Those have been greatest in thought who have been best endowed with faith, hope, sympathy, and the spirit of effort.  And next to them come the great stern, mournful men, like Tacitus, Dante,