of the personal
history of this author than of that of any contemporary writer of great
eminence. He was born at Paris, in August 1645, and his family appears
to have been anciently connected with the law. He must have been a man
of some means and of good education, for he had just bought himself an
important financial post at Caen, when, on the recommendation of
Bossuet, he was appointed Historical Preceptor to Duke Louis of Bourbon,
the grandson of Conde, in whose household he continued till his death in
1696. He had published his _Caracteres_ in 1687, and was elected to the
Academy in 1693.

The works of La Bruyere consist of the _Caracteres_ just mentioned, of a
translation of Theophrastus, of a few literary discourses, and
(probably) of some chapters on Quietism, written on the side of his
patron Bossuet during the great controversy with Fenelon, but not
published till after the author's death. The _Caracteres_ alone are of
much importance or interest.

The design of this curious and celebrated book is taken, like its title,
from Theophrastus, but the plan is very much altered as well as
extended. Instead of copying directly the abstract qualities of
Theophrastus and his brief, pregnant, but somewhat artificial and jejune
description of them, La Bruyere adopted a scheme much better suited to
his own age. He took for the most part actual living people, well known
to all his readers, and, disguising them thinly under names of the kind
which the romances of the middle of the century had rendered
fashionable, made them body forth the characters he wished to define and
satirise. These portraits he inserted in a framework not altogether
unlike that of the Montaigne essay, preserving no very consecutive plan,
but passing from moral reflection to literary criticism, and from
literary criticism to one of the half-personal, half-moralising
portraits just mentioned, with remarkable ease and skill. The titles of
his chapters are rather more indicative of their actual contents than
those of Montaigne's essays, but they represent, for the most part,
merely very elastic frames, in which the author's various observations
and reflections are mounted. The result of this variety, not to say
desultoriness, combined as it is with the display of very great literary
art, is that La Bruyere's is a book of almost unparalleled interest to
take up and lay down at odd moments. Its apparently continuous form and
its intermixture of narrativ