school,” being already nonsense by the very tenor of the doctrine, happens also to be chronologically impossible.  English writers could not take for a model what as yet had no collective existence.  Now, until the death of Charles II., no French literature could be said to have gathered or established itself; and as yet no ostentation of a French literature began to stir the air of Europe.  By the time, however, that Racine, La Fontaine, Boileau, Bossuet, and Fontenelle, had begun to fix the attention of foreign courts upon the French language, a necessity, no longer to be disguised, for some modern language as the common organ of diplomacy, had made itself universally acknowledged.  Not only were able negotiations continually neutralized by ignorance or unfamiliar command of the Latin; but at last, as the field of diplomacy was daily expanding, and as commerce kept ahead of all other interests, it became simply impossible, by any dexterity of evasions and compromises, to make a dead language do the offices of negotiation without barbarism and reciprocal misunderstanding.  Now was commencing the era of congresses.  The Westphalian congress, in 1648, had put up with Latin; for the interests which it settled, and the boundaries which it counterbalanced, were political and general.  The details of tariffs were but little concerned.  But those times were passing away.  A modern language must be selected for international treating, and for the growing necessities of travellers.  French probably would, by this time, have gained the distinction at any rate; for the same causes which carried strangers in disproportionate numbers to Paris—­viz. the newly-created splendour of that capital, and the extensive patronage of the French kings—­must have commensurately diffused the knowledge of the French language.  At such a critical moment, however, we cannot doubt that the French literature would give a determining impulse to the choice.  For besides that the literature adapts itself beyond all others to the classes of society having little time for reflection, and whose sensibilities are scattered by dissipation, it offers even to the meditative the high quality of self-consistency.  Springing from a low key of passion, it still justifies its own pretensions to good taste, (that is, to harmony with itself and its own principles.) Fifty years later, or about the middle of the eighteenth century, we see a second impulse given to the same literature, and therefore to the same language.  A new race of writers were at that time seasoning the shallowest of all philosophies with systematic rancour against thrones and Christianity.  To a military (and therefore in those days ignorant) aristocracy, such as all continental states were cursed with, equally the food and the condiment were attractive beyond any other.  And thus, viz. through such accidents of luck operating upon so shallow a body of estimators as the courtiers and the little adventurers of the Continent, did the French literature