Joubert, Joseph

author of "Pensées," born in Montignac, Périgord; educated in Toulouse, succeeded to a small competency, came to Paris, got acce to the best literary circles, and was the most brilliant figure in the salon of Madame de Beaumont; his works were exclusively pensées and maxims, and bear at once on ethics, politics, theology, and literature; "There is probably," Profe or Saints bury says, "no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small space and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expre ion;... all alike have the characteristic of intense compre ion; he describes his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'" (1754-1824).