not venture into its dangerous society before you are assured in your own heart that you have a good escort furnished by ideal nature.  Live with your age, but be not its creation; labour for your contemporaries, but do for them what they need, and not what they praise.  Without having shared their faults, share their punishment with a noble resignation, and bend under the yoke which they find is as painful to dispense with as to bear.  By the constancy with which you will despise their good fortune, you will prove to them that it is not through cowardice that you submit to their sufferings.  See them in thought such as they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act for them.  Seek to owe their suffrage to their dignity; but to make them happy keep an account of their unworthiness; thus, on the one hand, the nobleness of your heart will kindle theirs, and, on the other, your end will not be reduced to nothingness by their unworthiness.  The gravity of your principles will keep them off from you, but in play they will still endure them.  Their taste is purer than their heart, and it is by their taste you must lay hold of this suspicious fugitive.  In vain will you combat their maxims, in vain will you condemn their actions; but you can try your moulding hand on their leisure.  Drive away caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, from their pleasures, and you will banish them imperceptibly from their acts, and at length from their feelings.  Everywhere that you meet them, surround them with great, noble, and ingenious forms; multiply around them the symbols of perfection, till appearance triumphs over reality, and art over nature.

LETTER X.

Convinced by my preceding letters, you agree with me on this point, that man can depart from his destination by two opposite roads, that our epoch is actually moving on these two false roads, and that it has become the prey, in one case, of coarseness, and elsewhere of exhaustion and de pravity.  It is the beautiful that must bring it back from this twofold departure.  But how can the cultivation of the fine arts remedy, at the same time, these opposite defects, and unite in itself two contradictory qualities?  Can it bind nature in the savage, and set it free in the barbarian?  Can it at once tighten a spring and loose it, and if it cannot produce this double effect, how will it be reasonable to expect from it so important a result as the education of man?

It may be urged that it is almost a proverbial adage that the feeling developed by the beautiful refines manners, and any new proof offered on the subject would appear superfluous.  Men base this maxim on daily experience, which shows us almost always clearness of intellect, deli cacy of feeling, liberality and even dignity of conduct, associated with a cultivated taste, while an uncultivated taste is almost always accompanied by the opposite qualities.  With considerable