tain that it is widely
disseminated among those of our neighbours who are most prompt and
effective in action, and whose vigour is in no degree paralysed by the
clairvoyance with which they seek for exact truth even in the most
romantic and illusive spiritual circumstances. To throw light on this
aspect of French character, I propose to call attention to a little
book, which is probably well-known to my readers already, but which
may be regarded from a point of view, as I venture to think, more
instructive than that which is usually chosen.

In the year 1665 there appeared anonymously in Paris, in all the
circumstances of well-advertised secrecy, a thin volume of "Maximes,"
which were understood to have exercised for years past the best
thoughts of a certain illustrious nobleman. Mme de Sable, who was not
foreign to the facts, immediately wrote a review, intended for the
_Journal des Scavants_, in the course of which she said that the new
book was "a treatise on movements of the human heart which may be said
to have remained until now unrecognized." The book, as every one
knows, was the work of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, and the subject
of it was an unmasking of "the veritable condition of man."

It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost
exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great
writers of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime--
the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that
egotism is the _primum mobile_ of all human action, and that man is
wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will.
He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we
do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says,
"All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in
the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one
another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet
again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which
seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested
instincts of the human soul, for he says "_Amour-propre_ is the love
of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into
their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes
them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in
all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it
lives on nothi