y will render
us that justice which is sometimes refused to us by our
contemporaries." This is an ideal to which Locke, anxious to make
disciples by his regular and sometimes racy use of language, never
attained. La Bruyere, who did not address the passing age, so polished
his periods that all successive generations have hailed him as one of
the greatest masters of prose.

Voltaire's definition of the style of La Bruyere is well known, but
cannot too often be repeated. He calls it "a rapid, concise, nervous
style, with picturesque expressions, a wholly novel use of the French
language, yet with no infringement of its rules." Fortunately, with
all his admiration of others--and his great chapter "Des Ouvrages de
l'Esprit" is one of the most generous and catholic examples of current
criticism which we possess in all literature--with his modest and
glowing appreciation of his famous predecessors, he did not attempt to
imitate them in the grand manner. We are able to perceive that
Bossuet, who was nearly twenty years his senior, to whom he owed his
advancement in life, whose majestic genius and princely prestige were
so well adapted to dazzle La Bruyere, remained his indefatigable
patron and probably his closest friend. But we do not find in La
Bruyere a trace of imitation of the great preacher whom he loved and
honoured. If we think what the authority of Bossuet had come to be at
the time when the "Caracteres" was published, how hardly its
evangelical science pressed upon the convictions of all Frenchmen, and
particularly upon those of men who accepted it as unquestionably as
did the author of that book, that there should be no trace of Bossuet
on his style is a great tribute to the originality of La Bruyere.

"There is no pleasure without variety," this same mighty Bossuet had
written in 1670, and his young friend had taken the axiom to heart. We
find him pursuing almost beyond the bounds of good taste the search
for variety of manner. He has strange sudden turns of thought,
startling addresses, inversions which we should blame as violent, if
they were not so eminently successful that we adopt them at once, as
we do Shakespeare's. La Bruyere passes from mysterious ironies to bold
and coarse invective, from ornate and sublime reflections to phrases
of a roguish simplicity. He suddenly drops his voice to a shuddering
whisper, and the next moment is fluting like a blackbird. The gaiety
with which he mocks the ambitions of t