Egmont, who was accounted an ignorant man, was certainly familiar with three.

The Cardinal, however, wrote not only with ease, but with remarkable elegance, vigor and vivacity, in whatever language he chose to adopt.

The style of his letters and other documents, regarded simply as compositions, was inferior to that of no writer of the age.

His occasional orations, too, were esteemed models of smooth and flowing rhetoric, at an epoch when the art of eloquence was not much cultivated.
Yet it must be allowed that beneath all the shallow but harmonious flow of his periods, it would be idle to search for a grain of golden sand.
Not a single sterling, manly thought is to be found in all his productions.

If at times our admiration is excited with the appearance of a gem of true philosophy, we are soon obliged to acknowledge, on closer inspection, that we have been deceived by a false glitter.