Jupin pour chaque état mit deux tables au monde; L'adroit, le vigilant, et le fort sont assis A la première; et les petits Mangent leur reste à la seconde.
Yet, while he saw them, he could smile. It was better to smile--if only with regret; better, above all, to pass lightly, swiftly, gaily over the depths as well as the surface of existence; for life is short--almost as short as one of his own fables--
Qui de nous des clartés de la voûte azurée Doit jouir le dernier? Est-il aucun moment Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement?
The age was great in prose as well as in poetry. The periods of BOSSUET, ordered, lucid, magnificent, reflect its literary ideals as clearly as the couplets of Racine. Unfortunately, however, in the case of Bossuet, the splendour and perfection of the form is very nearly all that a modern reader can appreciate: the substance is for the most part uninteresting and out-of-date. The truth is that Bossuet was too completely a man of his own epoch to speak with any great significance to after generations. His melodious voice enters our ears, but not our hearts. The honest, high-minded, laborious bishop, with his dignity and his enthusiasm, his eloquence and his knowledge of the world, represents for us the best and most serious elements in the Court of Louis. The average good man of those days must have thought on most subjects as Bossuet thought--though less finely and intensely; and Bossuet never spoke a sentence from his pulpit which went beyond the mental vision of the most ordinary of his congregation. He saw all round his age, but he did not see beyond it. Thus, in spite of his intelligence, his view of the world was limited. The order of things under Louis XIV was the one order: outside that, all was confusion, heresy, and the work of Satan. If he had written more often on the great unchanging fundamentals of life, more of his work would have been enduring. But it happened that, while by birth he was an artist, by profession he was a theologian; and even the style of Bossuet can hardly save from oblivion the theological controversies of two hundred years ago. The same failing mars his treatment of history. His _Histoire Universelle_ was conceived on broad and sweeping lines, and contains some perspicacious thinking; but the dominating notion of the book is a theological one--the illustration, by means of the events of history, of the divine governance of the world; and the fact that this conception of history has now become extinct has reduced the work to the level of a finely written curiosity.