CHAPTER V. THE ‘PROVINCIAL LETTERS.’

they are! . . . Is it possible to have a more perfect style, an irony finer, more delicate, more natural, more worthy of the Dialogues of Plato? . . . And what seriousness of tone, what solidity, what eloquence in the last eight Letters!” Our Gibbon attributed to the frequent perusal of them his own mastery of “grave and temperate irony.” Boileau pronounced them “unsurpassed” in ancient or modern prose. Encomiums could hardly go higher, and yet the language of Perrault is in a still higher strain: “There is more wit in these eighteen Letters than in Plato’s page 155Dialogues; more delicate and artful raillery than in those of Lucian; and more strength and ingenuity of reasoning than in the orations of Cicero.” Their style especially is beyond all praise. It has “never been surpassed, nor perhaps equalled.” There may be, as there is apt to be in all such concurrent verdicts, a strain of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed so many of the highest judges of literary form. It is not for any Englishman to challenge the verdict of a Frenchman in a matter of style.