The age was great in prose as well as in poetry.  The periods of BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as clearly as the couplets of Racine.  Unfortunately, however, in the case of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all that a modern reader can appreciate:  the substance is for the most part uninteresting and out-of-date.  The truth is that Bossuet was too completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance to after generations.  His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our hearts.  The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis.  The average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as Bossuet thought—­though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of the most ordinary of his congregation.  He saw all round his age, but he did not see beyond it.  Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of the world was limited.  The order of things under Louis XIV was the one order:  outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan.  If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of life, more of his work would have been enduring.  But it happened that, while by birth he was an artist, by profession he was a theologian; and even the style of Bossuet can hardly save from oblivion the theological controversies of two hundred years ago.  The same failing mars his treatment of history.  His Histoire Universelle was conceived on broad and sweeping lines, and contains some perspicacious thinking; but the dominating notion of the book is a theological one—­the illustration, by means of the events of history, of the divine governance of the world; and the fact that this conception of history has now become extinct has reduced the work to the level of a finely written curiosity.

Purely as a master of prose Bossuet stands in the first rank.  His style is broad, massive, and luminous; and the great bulk of his writing is remarkable more for its measured strength than for its ornament.  Yet at times the warm spirit of the artist, glowing through the well-ordered phrases, diffuses an extraordinary splendour.  When, in his Meditations sur l’Evangile or his Elevations sur les Mysteres, Bossuet unrolls the narratives of the Bible or meditates upon the mysteries of his religion, his language takes on the colours of poetry and soars on the steady wings of an exalted imagination.  In his famous Oraisons Funebres the magnificent amplitude of his art finds its full expression.  Death, and Life, and the majesty of God, and the transitoriness of human glory—­upon such themes he speaks with an organ-voice which reminds an English reader of the greatest of his English contemporaries, Milton.  The pompous, rolling, resounding sentences follow one another in a long solemnity, borne forward by a vast movement of eloquence which underlies, controls, and animates them all.