ritten by a man of fashion,
of which professed authors need be jealous."

Lord Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, says, "Till you come to
know mankind by your experience, I know no thing nor no man that can
in the meantime bring you so well acquainted with them as Le Duc de la
Rochefoucauld. His little book of maxims, which I would advise you to
look into for some moments at least every day of your life, is, I fear,
too like and too exact a picture of human nature. I own it seems to
degrade it, but yet my experience does not convince me that it degrades
it unjustly."

Bishop Butler, on the other hand, blames the book in no measured terms.
"There is a strange affectation," says the bishop, "in some people of
explaining away all particular affection, and representing the whole
life as nothing but one continued exercise of self-love. Hence arise
that surprising confusion and perplexity in the Epicureans of old,
Hobbes, the author of 'Reflexions Morales,' and the whole set of
writers, of calling actions interested which are done of the most
manifest known interest, merely for the gratification of a present
passion."

The judgment the reader will be most inclined to adopt will perhaps be
either that of Mr. Hallam, "Concise and energetic in expression, reduced
to those short aphorisms which leave much to the reader's acuteness and
yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident
generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method,
without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of
profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the
world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . .
yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate
inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely
fails to generate." Or that of Addison, who speaks of Rochefoucauld "as
the great philosopher for administering consolation to the idle, the
curious, and the worthless part of mankind."

We are fortunately in possession of materials such as rarely exist to
enable us to form a judgment of Rochefoucauld's character. We have, with
a vanity that could only exist in a Frenchman, a description or portrait
of himself, of his own painting, and one of those inimitable living
sketches in which his great enemy, Cardinal De Retz, makes all the chief
actors in the court of the regency of Anne of Austria pass across the