dissecting him and preparing him as a specimen for a public
lecture in the schools. Not a vein, not a fibre will escape him, and
from that man's heart he will draw the inmost springs of passion and
expose the circulation of every vice."

It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these
investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies and
less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title of it is
"Characters; or, the Manners of this Age." It was published in January
1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier,
and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from
1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is
short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a
fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless
phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the
range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the
"Caracteres." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social
remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyere, always extremely
fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to
resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to
diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for
more than a generation, but La Bruyere invented a new kind of
portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caracteres," "you
make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make _my_
book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of
parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed
at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most
workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument that
moves and, rings.

What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caracteres" after
a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all
literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and
buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may
expand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but
with a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a
dozen chronometers. La Bruyere's observations are noted in a manner
that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of
his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that he
was incessantly improving his work, rev