It was perhaps also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.
What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation?
Who is this man of letters?
A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb who nurses his own dainty wits in critical sterility, despises him as Sir Piercie Shafton would have despised Lord Lindsay of the Byres.

This notwithstanding, the man of letters has his work to do in the critical period of social transition.

He is to be distinguished from the great systematic thinker, as well as from the great imaginative creator.

He is borne on the wings neither of a broad philosophic conception nor of a lofty poetic conception.

He is only the propagator of portions of such a conception, and of the minor ideas which they suggest.