dramas pass in a world of his own invention—­a world curiously compounded of imagination and reality.  At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of conventional fantasy, playing charmingly round impossible situations and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood.  But if Marivaux had been simply fantastic and nothing more, his achievement would have been insignificant; his great merit lies in his exquisite instinct for psychological truth.  His plays are like Watteau’s pictures, which, for all the unreality of their atmosphere, produce their effect owing to a mass of accurate observation and a profound sense of the realities of life.  His characters, like Watteau’s, seem to possess, not quite reality itself, but the very quintessence of rarefied reality—­the distilled fragrance of all that is most refined, delicate and enchanting in the human spirit.  His Aramintes, his Silvias, his Lucidors are purged of the grossnesses of existence; their minds and their hearts are miraculously one; in their conversations the subtleties of metaphysicians are blended with the airy clarities of birds. Le Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard is perhaps the most perfect example of his work.  Here the lady changes places with her waiting-maid, while the lover changes places with his valet, and, in this impossible framework of symmetrical complications, the whole action spins itself out.  The beauty of the little piece depends upon the infinitely delicate art which depicts each charmingly absurd, minute transition in the process of delusion, misunderstanding, bewilderment, and explanation, with all the varieties of their interactions and shimmering personal shades.  It would be difficult to find a more exquisite example of tender and discriminating fidelity to the loveliest qualities in human nature than the scene in which Silvia realizes at last that she is in love—­and with whom.  ‘Ah! je vois clair dans mon coeur!’ she exclaims at the supreme moment; and the words might stand as the epitome of the art of Marivaux.  Through all the superfine convolutions of his fancies and his coquetries he never loses sight for a moment of the clear truth of the heart.

While Marivaux, to use Voltaire’s phrase for him, was ’weighing nothings in scales of gossamer’, a writer of a very different calibre was engaged upon one of the most forcible, one of the most actual, and one of the hugest compositions that has ever come from pen of man.  The DUC DE SAINT-SIMON had spent his youth and middle life in the thick of the Court during the closing years of Louis XIV and the succeeding period of the Regency; and he occupied his old age with the compilation of his Memoires.  This great book offers so many points of striking contrast with the mass of French literature that it falls into a category of its own; no other work of the same outstanding merit can quite be compared to it; for it was the