t kind of metaphor. The philosophical language of
the day is present, but in no very prominent measure. The motto of the
book (at least in the fourth and fifth editions), 'Nos vertus ne sont le
plus souvent que des vices deguises,' is a very fair example of the
simple straightforward fashion of La Rochefoucauld's style. Sometimes,
but rarely, the author explains his meaning, and slightly lengthens his
phrase by repeating the sentiment in a somewhat different form, as thus,
'Le plaisir de l'amour est d'aimer, et l'on est plus heureux par la
passion qu'on a que par celle que l'on donne.' But even here it is to be
observed that the explanation is in a manner necessary to take off the
air of sententious enigma, which the words 'le plaisir de l'amour est
d'aimer' might have had by themselves. La Rochefoucauld is never
enigmatical, rarely sententious merely, and is almost indifferent to the
production of _mots_. How continually the study of brevity, combined
with precision, occupied the author, and how severe he was on any
exuberance, can be seen very instructively in the successive alterations
of his work. Thus, in the first edition Maxim 295 ran, 'La jeunesse est
une ivresse continuelle, c'est la fievre de la sante, c'est la folie de
la raison;' but La Rochefoucauld seems to have thought this unduly
pleonastic, and it appears later as 'La jeunesse est une ivresse
continuelle, c'est la fievre de la raison,' the improvement of which in
point and freshness is sufficiently obvious. The result of this process
is that the best of these Maxims are absolutely unrivalled in their own
peculiar style, and that all subsequent writers in the same style have
taken their form as a model. French critics have, as a rule, rather
under-than over-estimated the purely literary talent of La
Rochefoucauld. But this is due to two causes: first, to the supposed
antagonism of his spirit to conventional morality; secondly, to the fact
that he somewhat anticipated the writers of the particular period which
for a century and a half was the idol of academic criticism. His
language is rather that of Louis XIII. than of Louis XIV., and in his
words and phrases there is a certain archaism, not to say an occasional
irregularity, which critics who look only at the stop-watch apparently
find it hard to forgive.

[Sidenote: La Bruyere.]

These critics generally give the palm of style, as concerns writing of
this kind, to Jean de la Bruyere[270]. Less is known