to a process of haphazard, in which we more often miss the mark than hit.[2] Pleasure, ambition, industry, are only means of distracting men from the otherwise unavoidable contemplation of their own misery.  How speak of the dignity of the race and its history, when we know that a grain of sand in Cromwell’s bladder altered the destinies of a kingdom, and that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter the whole surface of the earth would be different?  Imagine, in a word, ’a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death; some of them each day butchered in the sight of the others, while those who remain watch their own condition in that of their fellows, and eyeing one another in anguish and hopelessness, wait their turn; such is the situation of man.’[3]

It was hardly possible to push the tragical side of the verities of life beyond this, and there was soon an instinctive reaction towards realities.  The sensations with their conditions of pleasure no less than of pain; the intelligence with its energetic aptitudes for the discovery of protective and fruitful knowledge; the affections with their large capacities for giving and receiving delight; the spontaneous inner impulse towards action and endurance in the face of outward circumstances—­all these things reassured men, and restored in theory to them with ample interest what in practice they had never lost—­a rational faith and exultation in their own faculties, both of finding out truth and of feeling a very substantial degree of happiness.  On this side too, as on the other, speculation went to its extreme limit.  The hapless and despairing wretches of Pascal were transformed by the votaries of perfectibility into bright beings not any lower than the angels.  Between the two extremes there was one fine moralist who knew how to hold a just balance, perceiving that language is the expression of relations and proportions, that when we speak of virtue and genius we mean qualities that compared with those of mediocre souls deserve these high names, that greatness and happiness are comparative terms, and that there is nothing to be said of the estate of man except relatively.  This moralist was Vauvenargues.

Vauvenargues was born of a good Provencal stock at Aix, in the year 1715.  He had scarcely any of that kind of education which is usually performed in school-classes, and he was never able to read either Latin or Greek.  Such slight knowledge as he ever got of the famous writers among the ancients was in translations.  Of English literature, though its influence and that of our institutions were then becoming paramount in France, and though he had a particular esteem for the English character, he knew only the writings of Locke and Pope, and the Paradise Lost.[4] Vauvenargues must be added to the list of thinkers and writers whose personal history shows, what men of letters sometimes appear to be in a conspiracy to make us forget, that for sober, healthy, and robust judgment on human nature and life, active and sympathetic