to-day, and many a quality now seems petty indeed that he commended in some of his great ones.  And yet are there, unperceived as it were by him, four or five men in the midst of the glittering crowd hard by the monarch’s throne, four or five earnest benevolent faces on whom our eye still rests gladly; though Saint-Simon gives them no special attention or thought, for in his heart he looks with disfavour on the ideas that govern their life.  Fenelon is there; the Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers; there is Monsieur le Dauphin.  Their happiness is no greater than that of the rest of mankind.  They achieve no marked success, they gain no resplendent victory, They live as the others live—­in the fret and expectation of the thing that we choose to call happiness, because it has yet to come.  Fenelon incurs the displeasure of the crafty, bigoted king, who, for all his pride, would resent the most trivial offence with the humbleness of humblest vanity; who was great in small things, and petty in all that was great—­for such was Louis XIV.  Fenelon is condemned, persecuted, exiled.  The Dukes of Chevreuse and Beauvilliers continue to hold important office at Court, but none the less deem it prudent to live in a kind of voluntary retirement.  The Dauphin is not in favour with the King; a powerful, envious clique are for ever intriguing against him, and they finally succeed in crushing his youthful military glory.  He lives in the midst of disgrace, misadventure, disaster, that seem irreparable in the eyes of that vain and servile Court; for disgrace and disaster assume the proportions the manners of the day accord.  Finally he dies, a few days after the death of the wife he had loved so tenderly.  He dies—­poisoned, perhaps, as she too; the thunderbolt falling just as the very first rays of kingly favour, whereon he had almost ceased to count, were stealing over his threshold.  Such were the troubles and misfortunes, the sorrows and disappointments, that wrapped these lives round; and yet, as we look on this little group, standing firm and silent in the midst of the feverish, intermittent glitter of the rest, then do these four destinies seem truly beautiful to us, and enviable.  Through all their vicissitudes one common light shines through them.  The great soul of Fenelon illumines them all.  Fenelon is faithful to his loftiest thoughts of piety, meekness, wonder, justice, and love; and the other three are faithful to him, who was their master and friend.  And what though the mystic ideas of Fenelon be no longer shared by us:  what though the ideas that we cling to ourselves, and deem the profoundest and noblest—­the ideas that live at the root of our every conviction of life, that have served as the basis of all our moral happiness—­what though these should one day fall in ruins behind us, and only arouse a smile among such as believe that they have found other thoughts still, which to them seem more human, and final?  Thought, of itself, is possessed of no vital importance; it is the feelings