cted by an English habit of sermonising. "Never resist
temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good," is a
sermon. But he has the inborn love of maxims, all the same, and, though
they are too often as long as a book, or even as a preface, his maxims
sometimes have the genuine medicinal taste. These from _The
Revolutionist's Handbook_, for instance, are true maxims:

"Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation."

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of
temptation with the maximum of opportunity."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport;
when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The
distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater."

"Home is the girl's prison, and the woman's workhouse."

"Decency is Indecency's Conspiracy of Silence."

But among the masters of the maxim, I suppose no one has come so near as
Chamfort to the Master himself. There is a difference. If Chamfort
brings rather less strength and bitterness to his dose, he presents it
with a certain grace, a sense of mortal things, and a kind of pity
mingled with his contempt that Rochefoucauld would have despised:

"Il est malheureux pour les hommes que les pauvres n'aient
pas l'instinct ou la fierte de l'elephant, qui ne se reproduit pas
dans la servitude."

"Otez l'amour-propre de l'amour, il en reste tres peu de
chose."

"Il n'y a que l'inutilite du premier deluge qui empeche
Dieu d'en envoyer un second."

"L'homme arrive novice a chaque age de la vie."

"Sans le gouvernement on ne rirait plus en France."

With a difference, these come very near Rochefoucauld's own. "Take
self-love from love, and little remains," might be an extract from that
Doomsday Book of Egoism in which Rochefoucauld was so deeply read.
"Self-love is the Love of a man's own Self, and of everything else, for
his own Sake": so begins his terrible analysis of human motives, and no
man escapes from a perusal of it without recognition of himself, just as
there is no escape from Meredith's Egoist. All of us move darkly in that
awful abyss of Self, and as the fourth Maxim says, "When a Man hath
travelled never so far, and discovered never so much in the world of
Self-love, yet still the Terra Incognita will take up a considerable
part of the Map." On the belief that self-love prompts and pervades all
actions, the greater p