"It would seem, on first thoughts, that part of the pleasure of princes was to inconvenience other people; but no. Princes are like other men-they think of themselves, follow their taste, their passions, their conveniences. This is natural."

"People [against general invitations] invite, offer their houses, their table, their services; nothing costs anything (ne coute) but keeping your word."

"Men do not begin to think of making their fortune till thirty -at fifty it is not made. They begin to build in their old age, and die at the point of painting and glazing."

"The pleasure of criticism deprives us of the other pleasure of being keenly touched by beautiful things."

"To think only of yourself and of the present is one great source of error in politics."

"The flatterer has neither a sufficiently good opinion of himself nor of others."

"How do you amuse yourself? how do you pass your time? is the question alike of fools and men of intelligence. If I reply, I open my eyes and see, I open my ears and hear, I seek health, repose, liberty, it is saying nothing-it is no answer. Solid pleasures, great joys, the only real satisfactions of life, are not reckoned, do not make themselves felt. Do you play? do you mask? One must find an answer."

"The spirit of moderation, and a certain wisdom in conduct, leave men in obscurity; it needs great virtues to be known and admired, or perhaps great vices."

Would-be wits, buffoons-mauvais plaisants—are objects of his particular disgust. Perhaps he suffered from them; but we find something of the same feeling in Pascal in the startling saying—“ Discur de bons mots, mauvais caractère."

"So thick upon the ground are buffoons," says our author, "that one treads on them. It rains this sort of insect in all countries. Real fun is a rare thing. To a man born with it, the gift needs delicate handling. It is not often that the man who makes us laugh wins our esteem."

The book closes with these reflections:

"A certain inequality of condition, which shall keep up order and subordination, is the work of God, and implies a divine law. A too great disproportion, such as we observe among men, is their work, is the law of the strongest.

"All extremes are vicious, and come from men. sation is just, and comes from God.

All compen

"If people don't relish these characters, I am surprised; if they do relish them, I am surprised all the same.'

La Bruyère was emphatically a believer-holding a sense of a God to be innate-an obedient son of the Church, accepting all its teaching, but tempering the national conformity, and by implication his own, by the observation that each man selected for himself an inner creed, according to his particular bent, from the great body of dogmatic formula. His criticisms and strictures are confined to the practical religion of the day, to modern abuses and developments, to ecclesiastical fopperies and worldliness, with intimations of further and darker departures from the spirit of the Gospel. But this world occupied his own mind and intellect; and he wrote for men of the world, with the honest intention of showing them the way to live wisely and well in it. It was not man in his domestic and more private relations, but man in society, who employed and filled his thoughts; not, of course, stopping there his penetration reached beyond the scene of his scrutiny; but he does not follow men home. It is as they show themselves to the world that he paints them, convicting them of meanness, pride, arrogance,

self-seeking, and all the train of vices fostered by luxury, idleness, and vanity, in their intercourse with one another.

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All his art, all the graces of his style, go to set forth the attractiveness as well as virtue of honesty, simplicity, truth, and independence. He sees the ugliness of vice and selfishness, under whatever disguise, and makes us see it too. Les Caractères' is one of the books from which the reader ought to rise a wiser man. And he will scarcely rise a sadder one; for the humours, the inconsistencies, the harmless peculiarities of men furnished so much matter, and are hit off with a truth so keen, a wit of felicitous expression so rare, that these qualities seem to transfer themselves to his own mind, illuminating it with a sudden sense of insight and perception. As a friend of bright intelligence (introduced to the book for the first time) wrote, after a delighted glance through its pages: "Thank you for introducing us to La Bruyère. Most excellent I think he is so true, so simple, so natural. Exactly what I should have said myself."

Those of our readers who are familiar with this classic are likely to reproach us, under the disappointing unsatisfactory veil of translation, with not having chosen our extracts well. They will certainly miss many of their most favourite thoughts and characters; but the work is so varied, runs through so wide a range of subjects, all treated with the same happy conscientiousness, the same mind busy upon them, that it is

impossible to convey any adequate idea in a few pages. We shall be satisfied if, by what we have said and quoted, we tempt those who have only hitherto known La Bruyère as a name, to procure his 'Characters' in the original and read for themselves.

THE FOUR AGES.

ALL the thought that gets hold of the world's ear and imprints itself on the memory, all sententious wisdom and all sentimental poetry, agree in disparaging the later half of man's life. Life naturally divides itself into four ages-childhood, youth, middle life, and old age. The poet, the man of the world, and the moralist, are of one mind to centre all the charm, beauty, and joy of life upon the two first of these conditions, and to treat the remaining half, or it may well be threefourths of existence, as at best a flat, dull level of unromantic occupations, pleasures, and pains; more commonly a period of disappointment, failure, flagging hopes, discontent, and bodily suffering,—of losses which find no compensation; where we are daily losing what we desire to keep: a period in which it is ignoble to feel satisfaction, and truest philosophy to make short work of, and confound at once with old age. And so much are people the prey to popular impressions, and so apt to be guided by

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