Not to say that the French Revolution has since come; and has blown all that into the air, miles aloft,--where even the solid part of it, which must be recovered one day, much more the gaseous, which we trust is forever irrecoverable, now wanders and whirls; and many things are abolished, for the present, of more value than Belleisle!-- For my own share, being, as it were, forced accidentally to look at him again, I find in Belleisle a really notable man; far superior to the vulgar of noted men, in his time or ours.

Sad destiny for such a man! But when the general Life-element becomes so unspeakably phantasmal as under Louis XV., it is difficult for any man to be real; to be other than a play-actor, more or less eminent, and artistically dressed.

Sad enough, surely, when the truth of your relation to the Universe, and the tragically earnest meaning of your Life, is quite lied out of you, by a world sunk in lies; and you can, with effort, attain to nothing but to be a more or less splendid lie along with it! Your very existence all become a vesture, a hypocrisy, and hearsay; nothing left of you but this sad faculty of sowing chaff in the fashionable manner! After Friedrich and Voltaire, in both of whom, under the given circumstances, one finds a perennial reality, more or less,--Belleisle is next; none FAILS to escape the mournful common lot by a nearer miss than Belleisle.
Beyond doubt, there are in this man the biggest projects any French head has carried, since Louis XIV.

with his sublime periwig first took to striking the stars.

How the indolent Louis XV.