bâton de maréchal, marshaVs truncheon or bâton
5. l'humanité quand même, the maintenance of humanitarian senti m entait s m under ail circumstances.
6. Scapin, type of the ingenious and roguish valet in the comédies of Molière and his Italian models.
Page S6. — 1. Jacobin, the Jacobin club was made up of the most violent revolutionists, and for a time, under Robespierre's leadership, was suprême. It was chiefly responsible for the reign of terror.
Page S 7. — 1. composé vénéneux, John Morley (Miscellanies, vol. III) discusses adversely this fundamental thesis of Taine's vrork.
Page 88. — 1. Galilée, Galileo, born like Shakespeare in 1564, is one of the greatest names in modem science. His adhérence to the Copernican System led to his celebrated encounter with the Inquisition.
2. Descartes (1 596-1650), mathematician, physicist and metaphvsician. He is the greatest of French philosophera; and there is hardly an y development in modem philosophy which one may not find foreshadowed in his works.
3. Newton worked out his theory of gravitation between 1665 and 1685, thus revolutionizing man's conception of the uni verse.
Page 90. — 1. Pascal (1623-62), noted for epoch-making discoveries in physics and mathematics, and still more famous as author of a work of religions polemic, the Lettres Provinciales, wirich Macaulay considered one of the three most perfect prose works in ail literature; arid of a collection of Pensées, unique for
their union of profound thought and feeling, expressed in a style of marvelous éloquence.
2. Bossuet (1 627-1 704), the most éloquent of pulpit orators, ana one of the greatest of French writers. He represents a very orthodox and, therefore, rather antiquated point of view, but he represents it with unsurpassed power and logic. He was tutor to the Dauphin, and composed various works for his use, notably his Discours sur V histoire universelle which sought to prove that ail the events of history were but the working out of the Divine will. His Oraisons Funèbres are his most widely read work.
Page 91. — 1. Fénelon (1651-1715), a great prelate and writer. At first a friend and protégé of Bossuet, he later carried on with him a long and bitter controversy. Like him a preceptor to a royal prince, he composed various works with pédagogie intent. His edifying prose-poem, imitated from the Odyssey, Les Aventures de Téle'maqtie, used to charm our grandmothers in the earlier stages of their French, and might still profit and please their descendants far more than the usual indiffèrent fiction which has usurped its place.
2. Malebranche, a seventeenth century metaphysician of the school of Descartes, though subtly interfusing his metaphysics with an omniprésent théologie strain. The popular mind particulariy associâtes Malebranche with a quite unimportant tenet of his philosophy, the Cartesian theory of animal automatism, and with the anecdote which tells how this pious gentleman used to kick his dog by way of illustrating the doctrine.
3. leur siège était fait, their mind was made up in advance. It is said that the historian Vertot, having lost patience in waiting for the documents necessary for describing a siège, evolved the description from his inner consciousness and greeted the tardy arrivai of the papers with the words, " Mon siège est/ait."
4. Essai, Voltaire (cf. page 67, note 1) wrote his sceptical Essai in opposition to Bossuet's théologie interprétation of history (cf. page 90, note 2). The Essai is a review of the history of human progress through the âges.
Page 92. — i. Chaldée, Chaldaea (or Babylonia), an Asiatic territory, touching on the Persian Gulf.
Page 93. — 1. Turgot (1727-81), famous economist andstatesman — one of the most idéal characters in history. His broad ideas and philanthropie dévotion to the reforming of the abuses of feudalism found a poor second in Louis XVI, who dismissed him from office.
2. Condorcet, a most versatile writer, philosopher, mathematician, statesman and reformer, a co-laborer with Turgot — and with Voltaire. His principal work is the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de Vesprit humain. Shortly after writing this glowing exposition of human perfectibility, he was imprisoned by the Terrorists and died in his cell, presumably by poison.
3. Montesquieu (1 689-1 755), author of the Lettres Persanes, witty and unsparing satires on French society and institutions, in the guise of letters written by Persian travelers. Montesquieu also wrote V Esprit des Lois, a prof ound and brilliant philosophie study of political and social institutions. Cf. also pages 159^".
Page 95.. — 1. Condillac (1714-80), a philosopher whose System was in the main that of Locke, rejecting the theory of intuition and deriving ail man's knowledge from sensation i.e. from expérience and observation. This essentially untheological conception of man's nature has served as a basis for very récent psychologie théories, those of Mill and Spencer in England, of Wundt in Germany, of Taine in France, etc. Cf. page 115, lines 17 ff.
Page 96. — 1. Locke (1632-1704), an English philosopher. His Essay concerning Human Understanding is the most epochmaking philosophie work England has produced. Locke rejects innate ideas and dérives ail knowledge from expérience. He is thus a direct descendant from Bacon and a precursor of our expérimental psychology.
Page 98. — 1. Malherbe (1 555-1628), a poet, correct, formai and unimaginative. His rhetorical idéal of poetic style prevailed during the whole seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the résultant absence of the lyric note being the chief reason- why the foreign reader remains rather obtuse to the appeal of classic French verse.
2. Balzac (1 597-1654), an éloquent rhetorician, one of the founders of French prose.
