transmits itself, and endures.  It was only after the glorious years of Louis Xiv. that the nation felt with tremor and pride that such good fortune had happened to her.  Every voice in formed Louis Xiv. of it with flattery, exaggeration, and emphasis, yet with a certain sentiment of truth.  Then arose a singular and striking contradiction:  those men of whom Perrauit was the chief, the men who were most smitten with the marvels of the age of Louis the Great, who even went the length of sacrificing the ancients to the moderns, aimed at exalting and canonising even those whom they regarded as inveterate opponents and adversaries.  Boileau avenged and angrily upheld the ancients against Perrault, who extolled the moderns—­that is to say, Corneille, Moliere, Pascal, and the eminent men of his age, Boileau, one of the first, included.  Kindly La Fontaine, taking part in the dispute in behalf of the learned Huet, did not perceive that, in spite of his defects, he was in his turn on the point of being held as a classic himself.

Example is the best definition.  From the time France possessed her age of Louis Xiv. and could contemplate it at a little distance, she knew, better than by any arguments, what to be classical meant.  The eighteenth century, even in its medley of things, strengthened this idea through some fine works, due to its four great men.  Read Voltaire’s Age of Louis Xiv., Montesquieu’s Greatness and Fall of the Romans, Buffon’s Epochs of Nature, the beautiful pages of reverie and natural description of Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar, and say if the eighteenth century, in these memorable works, did not understand how to reconcile tradition with freedom of development and independence.  But at the be ginning of the present century and under the Empire, in sight of the first attempts of a decidedly new and somewhat adventurous literature, the idea of a classic in a few resist ing minds, more sorrowful than severe, was strangely nar rowed and contracted.  The first Dictionary of the Academy (1694) merely defined a classical author as “a much-approved ancient writer, who is an authority as regards the subject he treats.”  The Dictionary of the Academy of 1835 narrows that definition still more, and gives precision and even limit to its rather vague form.  It describes classical authors as those “who have become models in any language whatever,” and in all the articles which follow, the expressions, models, fixed rules for composition and style, strict rules of art to which men must conform, continually recur.  That definition of classic was evidently made by the respectable Academicians, our predecessors, in face and sight of what was then called romantic—­that is to say, in sight of the enemy.  It seems to me time to renounce those timid and restrictive definitions and to free our mind of them.  A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure,