a book as the Felicite Publique of the Marquis de Chastellux.  To Vauvenargues he replied with many compliments, and pointed out with a good deal of pains the injustice which the young critic had done to the great author of Cinna. ‘It is the part of a man like you,’ he said admirably, ’to have preferences, but no exclusions.’[13] The correspondence thus begun was kept up with ever-growing warmth and mutual respect.  ‘If you had been born a few years earlier,’ Voltaire wrote to him, ’my works would be worth all the more for it; but at any rate, even at the close of my career, you confirm me in the path that you pursue.’[14]

The personal impression was as fascinating as that which had been conveyed by Vauvenargues’ letters.  Voltaire took every opportunity of visiting his unfortunate friend, then each day drawing nearer to the grave.  Men of humbler stature were equally attracted.  ’It was at this time,’ says the light-hearted Marmontel, ’that I first saw at home the man who had a charm for me beyond all the rest of the world, the good, the virtuous, the wise Vauvenargues.  Cruelly used by nature in his body, he was in soul one of her rarest masterpieces.  I seemed to see in him Fenelon weak and suffering.  I could make a good book of his conversations, if I had had a chance of collecting them.  You see some traces of it in the selection that he has left of his thoughts and meditations.  But all eloquent and full of feeling as he is in his writings, he was even more so still in his conversation.’[15] Marmontel felt sincere grief when Vauvenargues died, and in the Epistle to Voltaire expressed his sorrow in some fair lines.  They contain the happy phrase applied to Vauvenargues, ’ce coeur stoique et tendre.’[16]

In religious sentiment Vauvenargues was out of the groove of his time.  That is to say, he was not unsusceptible of religion.  Accepting no dogma, so far as we can judge, and complying with no observances, very faint and doubtful as to even the fundamentals—­God, immortality, and the like—­he never partook of the furious and bitter antipathy of the best men of that century against the church, its creeds, and its book.  At one time, as will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the universe.  Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in a devotional spirit, of all larger mortal experiences and higher human impressions.  There is a Meditation on the Faith, including a Prayer, among his writings; and there can be little doubt, in spite of Condorcet’s incredible account of the circumstances of its composition,