of the men of Port Royal, who had espoused so warmly the Augustinian doctrine, as voluminously propounded by Jansen, that Pascal found himself called to a new service, and it was a service for the performance of which he possessed unrivalled qualifications. He had inhaled freedom of thought, without at the same time inhaling unbelief, in the perusal and study of Montaigne's Essays. With powers of mockery in which he was not outdone a century later by the encyclopedists, he had so got possession of the French language as that he could use it as an engine of irresistible demonstrative power, just as he had l earned to employ geometric and algebraic symbols, with the conciseness of truth at every step, and his sentences make way for themselves much like the rifle bullets of modern warfare: hit the bull's eye they do, and they pierce the target also. Moreover, while Pascal was as terrible in his sarcasm as if he had been the satirist only, his elevation of soul—the loftiness and the profundity of his religious convictions and conceptions gave him a power in reserve—a moral momentum which crushed an adversary, if it did not convert him. Pascal may be spoken of as the earliest French writer who, retaining the vigour and freshness that are characteristic of the speech of a people just coming forth from political and religious convulsions, so used it—he so forged it anew in passing through the fires of his mind—that it shows all the delicacy and the finish proper to an age a century more advanced in literary refinement. So it is that the "Provincial Letters," if one should take them up ignorant of their date, would be assigned to a time a hundred years later than that of their actual appearance. It has been by thus combining archaic robustness with delicacy and refinement that these compositions have taken, and that they still retain, their place as classics in French literature. The reverend fathers of the Jesuit Institute (those of Spain especially) had dreamed of no such untoward event as that of encountering an adversary like Blaise Pascal—the Louis de Montalte of the "Letters to a Country Cousin." In digesting, as they had done at their leisure that scheme of pliable casuistry which should fit itself to all imaginable occasions, when the consciences of men of the world—statesmen and princes, and the debauched frequenters of courts,—were to be soothed, eased, and managed, they had imagined that the field was quite safe from intrusion; and that none, or none of whom they need be in fear, would ever rise up to summon them to give an account of their teaching at the bar of European common sense. Little did they think that a man whose genius was to wake up the ear, not of France only, not of catholic countries only, but of the entire civilized world, was at hand who should rend asunder all evasions, should scatter sophistries, and should hold up to the scorn and resentment of all men, those frightful perversions of moral principles by means of which the "Society," had long been ensnaring consciences throughout the wide circle of its influence. The first of these "Letters," published, January 23, 1656, was written mainly in defence of Arnauld, and was aimed at the doctors of the Sorbonne. This letter gave the alarm; but it did not baffle the endeavours of the enemies of Port Royal. A second, a third, and a fourth quickly followed, and each as it appeared drew the world with it, and the "Society "stood aghast in its confusion: at that time it had in its service no writer of eminence, or any that could command public attention. This assault therefore took effect deeply upon the public mind, nor can it be doubted that these Letters had great influence in bringing about at a later time, the ruin and expulsion of the "Society" in each of the catholic countries in which it had got a footing. It should, however, be acknowledged that, in availing himself at the moment of the aid of his Port Royal friends, St. Cyran, Nicole, and others, who undertook the labour of finding for him, in the writings of the jesuit fathers, the passages that would best serve his purpose, he trusted them too far, eager controvertists as they were; and thus he either cited passages, or he so cited them apart from the context, as to make himself liable to a charge of want of candour, if not of strict integrity in his quotations. No such charge affects the main argument of the "Letters," and they have ever since stood confronting the Jesuit Society for its eternal ignominy. It is wholly in another light that Pascal appears when he is read as the author of the fragmentary collection entitled "Pensées:" it is in these "Thoughts," penetrative, profound, strenuous, sometimes harsh, rigorous, severe, or exaggerated, that he opens out to our view without reserve a mind which, considered in its various and its seemingly contradictory aspects, and in its powers and its moral grandeur, stands alone among the illustrious minds of all times. The fate, or we might say the fortunes of this collection of "Thoughts," has been extraordinary, and it should be understood. At an early time after his conversion, or, as we may say, his determination to dedicate his powers absolutely to purposes of piety, he appears to have formed the design of composing a work, on a comprehensive plan, in defence, first of the great principles of theology, or as a reply to atheists of all schools; and then in support of christianity or revelation as contained in the scriptures. As if for collecting materials which were afterwards to be digested and arranged, he was accustomed to snatch the moment, as it arose, for putting upon any scrap of paper at hand his meditations, sometimes mature and most carefully worded, sometimes crude, elliptical, and incoherently expressed. The subjects also are various—metaphysical, psychological, ethical, christian, or purely secular. Many of these notes of the hour were so written as to be quite illegible to any but himself, or to those among his friends who were well acquainted with his manner of writing. Happily a copy of the collection was made soon after his death by his intimate friends of Port Royal; and happily, also, the autograph and the copy annexed have been conserved, and are still in existence in the imperial library. This mass, which was the accumulation of about ten years, came at his death in 1662 into the hands of his literary executors—his friends of Port Royal. These good men, who at that time were expecting daily their fate at the hands of their remorseless enemies the jesuits, consulted their fears in this instance. They held their treasure in reserve seven years, and then they put forth an edition in preparing which they had used to the utmost extent the licence which an editor of posthumous writings may warrantably use; in truth they had greatly exceeded these limits: omissions, additions, the substitution of words, the glozing of passages for propitiating prejudice—all these vitiating methods had been carried much too far, and so it was that the Port Royal edition of 1669, under the care of Stephen Perier, were, if the "Pensées" of Pascal, yet they were not Pascal himself: nevertheless the collection kept its ground, such as it was, and editions of the same were repeated. In 1776 Condorcet, supported by his colleagues of the Encyclopedia, put forth an edition with many omissions, in which the metaphysical Pyrrhonism of the writer, separated from his religious belief, gave apparent countenance to the atheism which those eminent men were then labouring to promulgate. Other editors followed each his discretion, in the same manner, until at length in 1842 M. Cousin, suspecting the fidelity of all these editions, took the trouble to collate them with the autograph and the copy, and he made a report accordingly of the extent to which Pascal had suffered from the cowardice, or the mistaken discretion of those who had hitherto brought him before the world. The literary world of France was greatly moved by this discovery; and two years afterwards, in 1844, M. Prosper Faugēre put forth an edition in two octavo volumes, which he vouched for as faithful, complete, and authentic. In this edition a new and conjectural adjustment of the "Thoughts" was attempted; but a more recent editor, M. Havet, distrusting the hypothesis of his predecessor, has fallen back upon the order of earlier editions, and his edition in one volume octavo, Paris, 1852, may well be now accepted as an ultimate form of this precious collection. The title in full runs thus—"Pensées de Pascal publiées dans leur texte authentique avec un commentaire suivi et une etude litteraire;" par Ernest Havet, &c., Paris, 1852.
Worn out at an early age by sufferings the most extreme, which had been, if not caused, greatly aggravated by the fanciful extravagances of his ascetic rule, this great man died, August 19, 1662, being then in his fortieth year. A post mortem examination gave evidence, not merely of extensive disease affecting the vital organs, but of a peculiarity of structure in the brain and the cranium which could never have consisted with the enjoyment of tranquil health—a brain of extraordinary size and density was included in a skull without sutures!
Prefixed to the edition of the "Pensées," above named, are the authentic memoirs of Pascal by his sister Madame Perier, with notes thereupon; and from these sources, in addition to the Lives which have accompanied former editions of the same, is to be drawn what may be known of the personal history of this illustrious man.—I. T.
PASCHAL I., Pope, a Roman by birth, was a Benedictine
