ral
qualities of their fellows, a high place should be reserved for the
Maxims of Rochefoucauld".

REFLECTIONS; OR, SENTENCES AND MORAL MAXIMS

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

[This epigraph which is the key to the system of La Rochefoucauld, is
found in another form as No. 179 of the maxims of the first edition,
1665, it is omitted from the 2nd and 3rd, and reappears for the first
time in the 4th edition, in 1675, as at present, at the head of the
Reflections.--Aime Martin. Its best answer is arrived at by reversing
the predicate and the subject, and you at once form a contradictory
maxim equally true, our vices are most frequently but virtues
disguised.]

1.--What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and
divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange;
and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave,
and women chaste.

"Who combats bravely is not therefore brave, He dreads a death-bed like
the meanest slave; Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise, His pride
in reasoning, not in acting, lies." Pope, Moral Essays, Ep. i. line 115.

2.--Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.

3.--Whatever discoveries have been made in the region of self-love,
there remain many unexplored territories there.

[This is the first hint of the system the author tries to develope. He
wishes to find in vice a motive for all our actions, but this does not
suffice him; he is obliged to call other passions to the help of his
system and to confound pride, vanity, interest and egotism with self
love. This confusion destroys the unity of his principle.--Aime Martin.]

4.--Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.

5.--The duration of our passions is no more dependant upon us than the
duration of our life. [Then what becomes of free will?--Aime; Martin]

6.--Passion often renders the most clever man a fool, and even sometimes
renders the most foolish man clever.

7.--Great and striking actions which dazzle the eyes are represented by
politicians as the effect of great designs, instead of which they are
commonly caused by the temper and the passions. Thus the war between
Augustus and Anthony, which is set down to the ambition they entertained
of making themselves masters of the world, was probably but an effect of
jealousy.

8.--The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are
a natural