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Biographical Sketch
11
every manner of style. What, therefore, remained to be done?"
Hence we find at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France a school in a transition stage, "half believing and half sceptical, half literary and half savant; which has been forgotten," says Labitte, in his Precursory Writers of the Age of Louis XIV, "because it grazed all parties without belonging to any one of them, and because, while it has written much, it has left nothing in relief, nothing that can be called monumental." The writers of this school, however, though disdained and eclipsed by their great successors of the era of Louis XIV,
