If the soliloquising Barber ask: "What has your Lordship done to earn all this ?" and can only answer: "You took the trouble to be born (Vous vous etes donne la peine de naitre)," all men must laugh: and a gay horse-racing Anglomaniac Noblesse loudest of all.

For how can small books have a great danger in them?
asks the Sieur Caron; and fancies his thin epigram may be a kind of reason.

Conqueror of a golden fleece, by giant smuggling; tamer of hell-dogs, in the Parlement Maupeou; and finally crowned Orpheus in the Theatre Francais, Beaumarchais has now culminated, and unites the attributes of several demigods.

We shall meet him once again, in the course of his decline.
Still more significant are two Books produced on the eve of the ever-memorable Explosion itself, and read eagerly by all the world: Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, and Louvet's Chevalier de Faublas.
Noteworthy Books; which may be considered as the last speech of old Feudal France.

In the first there rises melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world: everywhere wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea.