of Johnson’s time, with the honours accorded to men like Prior and Addison at an earlier date, and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the authors of our own day.  But these brilliant passages hardly go lower than the surface of the great change.  Its significance lay quite apart from the prices paid for books.  The all-important fact about the men of letters in France was that they constituted a new order, that their rise signified the transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands, and that, while they were the organs of a new function, they associated it with a new substitute for doctrine.  These men were not only the pupils of the Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the teachers, the guides, and the directors of society.  For two hundred years the followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the secular clergy.  Their own hour had now struck.  The rationalistic historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great Order rendered to European civilisation.  The immorality of many of their maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and obstructiveness of the years of their decrepitude, have blinded us to the many meritorious pages of the Jesuit chronicle.  Even men like Diderot and Voltaire, whose lives were for years made bitter by Jesuit machinations, gave many signs that they recognised the aid which had been rendered by their old masters to the cultivation and enlightenment of Europe.  It was from the Jesuit fathers that the men of letters whom they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which made the world and its daily interests so real to them.  It was perhaps also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.

What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation?  Who is this man of letters?  A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb who nurses his own dainty wits in critical sterility, despises him as Sir Piercie Shafton would have despised Lord Lindsay of the Byres.  This notwithstanding, the man of letters has his work to do in the critical period of social transition.  He is to be distinguished from the great systematic thinker, as well as from the great imaginative creator.  He is borne on the wings neither of a broad philosophic conception nor of a lofty poetic conception.  He is only the propagator of portions of such a conception, and of the minor ideas which they suggest.  Unlike the Jesuit father whom he replaced, he has no organic