e save it from the appearance of severity
which the avowed Maxim or Pensee has; while the bond between the
different chapters, and even the different paragraphs, is so slight that
interruption is not felt to be annoying. Even now, when the zest of
personal malice, which, as Malezieux remarked to the author, made him
sure beforehand of 'plenty of readers and plenty of enemies,' is past,
it is a most interesting book to read; and it is especially interesting
to Englishmen, because there is no doubt that the English essayists of
the Queen Anne school directly modelled themselves upon it.

It has been objected to La Bruyere that he is less of a thinker than of
a clever writer, and there is truth in the objection. He was possessed
of a remarkable shrewdness, common sense, and soundness of taste; thus,
for instance, he protests energetically against the foolish pedantry
which rejected as obsolete many of the most useful and most picturesque
words in French, and so sets himself directly against the dominant and
very unfortunate literary influence of his time, that of Boileau. Yet he
himself wrote in the fashionable style, and in the language rather of
Racine than of Corneille. A further objection, also a just one, is that
his characters are too much of their age and not of all time. This
objection, indeed, applies to almost all writers after 1660, except
Moliere, and La Fontaine, and La Rochefoucauld. But La Bruyere (though
there are some sarcastic insinuations which seem to hint that his range
was wider than he chose to show) is as unwilling to disentangle himself
from Versailles and Paris as his English followers are to extend their
gaze to something beyond 'the town.' Nor is there the force and vigour
about La Bruyere's moral reflections that there is about La
Rochefoucauld's. They are frequently commonplace, sometimes even
platitudinous, and the author occasionally falls into what is perhaps
the most dangerous pitfall for a moralist and social satirist, the
adoption of stock butts and types. It is indeed most probable that La
Bruyere was one of those who, according to a famous phrase of his enemy
and successor, Fontenelle, 'may have their hands full of truth, but may
not care to open more than their little finger.' He was not, like La
Rochefoucauld, a great noble with the liberty of the Fronde in his mind,
but a man of no exalted rank, living in the most absolute period of
Louis the Fourteenth's rule. His remark that 'les g