the real La Bruyère peeps out in the bold query, "Is the flock made for the shepherd, or the shepherd for the flock?" And in his unvarnished chapter-the ninth-"On the Great," he openly exclaims that there "is hidden a malignant and corrupt sap under the outward covering of politeness. The people have scarcely any knowledge, and the great have no soul. Must I choose? I do not hesitate; I will belong to the people." Noble words, truly! In his sixth chapter, "On Wealth," how he flays the parvenus, more despicable even than the nobles! La Bruyère tried, above all, to make the people know the court for what it really was, to make them ashamed of aping court manners, and to awaken them to a sense of their ignorance and possible betterment.

It is idle to criticise too severely the style of such a writer. What if he is not supremely literary? he pursued certain aims more vital than those literary. And even if it be true that he was a clever writer rather than great thinker, it is sufficient honor to his memory that he was a bold decrier of court profligacy, luxury and heartlessness. From a purely literary standpoint critic Saintsbury finds, nevertheless, in his pages the model followed by the English essayists of the Queen Anne school.

RUFFIN.

RUFFIN is beginning to grow gray; but he is healthy, and his fresh complexion and lively eye promise him still some twenty years of life: he is gay, jovial, familiar, indifferent; he laughs with all his heart, and he laughs all alone, without any reason; he is pleased with himself, his family, his little fortune; he says he is happy. He loses his only son, a very hopeful young man, and who might have been one day the honor of his family; he surrenders to others the trouble of lamenting for him, saying, "My son is dead; it will kill his mother;" and he is comforted. He has no passions, he has neither friends nor foes, he dislikes nobody, everybody pleases him; everything suits him; he speaks to any one whom he sees for the first time with the same freedom and confidence as he does to those whom he calls his old friends, and he soon imparts to him his puns and his little

stories. You may come up to him, and you may leave him without his paying any attention to the fact, and the same story that he has begun to tell to one person he will finish to the person who takes his place.

MENALQUE.

MENALQUE comes down stairs, opens the door to go out, and shuts it again, for he perceives that he is in his nightcap. On examining himself closer, he finds that he has only half shaved, that his sword hangs on his right side, and his stockings are turned down over his heels. If he walks abroad, he feels all at once a violent blow on his chest or face; he does not guess what it can be, till, arousing himself and opening his eyes, he finds himself before the shaft of a cart, or behind a carpenter's long plank, that a workman is carrying on his shoulders.

He has been seen to knock his forehead against that of a blind man; he gets entangled in his legs, they both tumble down, one on one side, and the other on the other; and several times he has happened to find himself face to face with a prince, and just in his way; he recollects himself with difficulty, and has only time to squeeze close against a wall to inake room for him.

He enters a room and passes under a lustre, on which his wig is caught and remains hanging; all the courtiers look and laugh. Menalque looks, too, and laughs louder than any. He looks all round the assembly to see who is showing his ears, and minus a wig. If he goes into the town, after having proceeded some little distance, he thinks he has gone wrong, and is vexed; he asks the passers-by where he is, and they tell him precisely the name of his own street; then he enters his house, but comes out again in a hurry, thinking he has made a mistake. He writes a long letter, and thinks he has sanded it several times, but always throws the sand into the inkstand. This is not all; he writes a second letter, and, after having sealed them, he makes a mistake in the addresses. A duke receives one of these two letters, and on opening it reads these words: "M. Olivier, do not fail, as soon as you

receive this, to send me my supply of hay." His farmer receives the other; he opens it, and gets it read; they find "My lord, I have received, with blind submission, the orders that it has pleased your highness," etc. He meets a young widow by chance-he speaks to her of her late husband, and asks how he died: at these words the woman's grief is renewed; she weeps and sobs, and does not forget to go over all the details of her husband's illness from the time that he was quite well just before his fever till his last moments. Madam," asks Menalque, who had apparently listened with emotion, "is that all that is the matter with you?"

He is never really with those with whom he seems to be. He calls his lackey very gravely, "Sir," and his friend "La Verdure;" he says "Your Reverence" to a prince of the blood, and "Your Highness" to a Jesuit. He finds himself with a magistrate; this gentleman, grave by character, venerable from age and dignity, questions him on an event, and asks him if it is so. Menalque answers, "Yes, Miss." Once he was returning from the country; his own footmen undertook to rob him, and succeeded; they got down from his carriage, put the end of a torch to his throat, and demanded his purse, and he gave it up to them. Arrived at home, he related his adventure to a friend, who did not fail to question him about all the circumstances; he said to him, "Ask my servants; they were there."

MAXIMS are found in every language, but few are the authors that have de

voted their genius entirely to this form of expression. François de Marcillac, Duc de Rochefoucauld (1630-1680), is the most famous writer of maxims of any country or age. His celebrated "Reflections and Opinions, or Moral Maxims" were penned by him after he had passed through the winds of gallantry and the storms of the Fronde, and had retired, in political disgrace, to his country estate. Born one of the noblest peers of France, and zealous for the nobility, he had unsheathed his sword against the party of Mazarin, had fought in the streets of Paris, and had distinguished himself by almost reckless bravery. In the affairs of the heart he had been successively the cavalier of three of Paris's reigning queens of beauty and fashion: Mme. de Chevreuse, Mme. de Longueville, and Mme. de La Fayette. He was thus well versed in both the love and war of his day. He was himself a child of his age, and his "Maxims" were the natural fruit of his own experience.

Professor Saintsbury has epitomized the pith of La Rochefoucauld's "Maxims," declaring that they "are, without exception, on ethical subjects, and, with a certain allowance, they may be said to be generally directed to the reduction of the motives and conduct of men to the single principle of self-love." His general motto for them was, "Our virtues are most often only our vices in disguise." Thus moralizing on human nature simply as he found it, he opposed himself to the conventional morality, and the sententiousness of his Maxims" gives them an added ring of apparent cynicism. And yet it would be unjust to stigmatize La Rochefoucauld,

penning these curt reflections in old age, in his retreat, as a misanthrope. He was merely a scientific observer of society, reporting in the most concise bulletins the truths revealed by his pitiless, merciless scalpel of criticism. He compacts his report, indeed, into a quinine pill of condensed worldly wisdom. But as historian Henri Martin has justly observed, "Self-love is one of the two aspects of life; La Rochefoucauld has never detected the other-the attraction which draws us to each other, and which becomes a virtue when we govern ourselves

FRIENDS.

according to a moral order. La Rochefoucauld knows men; he does not know man." A great contemporary of this maker of maxims no other than Cardinal de Retz-applied this touchstone not solely to the "Maxims," but even to the author's life and conduct. He declared: "He always thought he stood in need of apology, which, coupled with his Maxims, that do not display much faith in virtue, and with his practice, that has always been to extricate himself with as much impatience as he became

involved, makes me conclude that he would have done much better to become acquainted with himself, and to confine himself to passing, as he might have done, for the most polished courtier and the most honorable man in regard to every-day life who has been known in his generation."

The service of such "Maxims" as La Rochefoucauld's is, however, that they so unmask the petty vices and vanities (frequently masquerading as virtues, as he states), that their practice tends to be diminished. Nor can the highest literary praise be grudged these unadorned thoughts. They have not