her pulpits. If
Jeremy Taylor had been a Frenchman, the work of La Bruyere might have
been different. But the French orators lacked the splendour and oddity
of the author of "The Great Exemplar," and we can feel that La
Bruyere, who was instinct with the need for colour, was dissatisfied
with the broad outlines and masses of character for which the French
divines were famous; indeed, even Bossuet, to an English reader fresh
from Fuller and Taylor, seems with all his magnificence too abstract
and too rhetorical. La Bruyere determined to be less exacting and yet
more exact; he would sink to describing emotions less tremendous and
to designing figures of more trifling value, but he would paint them
with a vivid detail hitherto unsolicited. The consequence was that the
public instantly responded to his appeal, and we have continued to
contemplate with reverence Bossuet's huge historical outlines, but to
turn for sheer pleasure to La Bruyere's finished etchings of the
tulipomaniac and the collector of engravings.

Everyone who approaches an analysis of the "Caracteres" is obliged to
pause to commend the style of La Bruyere. It is indeed exquisite. At
the time his book was published our own John Locke was putting
together his famous "Thoughts on Education," and he remarked on the
"policy" of the French, who were not thinking it "beneath the public
care to promote and reward the improvement of their own language.
Polishing and enriching their tongue," so Locke proceeds, "is no small
business amongst them." It is perhaps not extravagant to believe that
in writing these words the English philosopher was thinking of the new
Parisian moralist. For La Bruyere was a great artist, who understood
the moral value of form in a degree which would peculiarly commend
itself to the lucid mind of Locke. He says, early in his book, "Among
all the different expressions which can render a single one of our
thoughts, there is only one which is right. We do not always hit upon
it in speaking or composing; nevertheless it is a fact that somewhere
it exists, and everything else is feeble and does not satisfy a man of
intelligence who desires to be understood." This search for the one
and only perfect expression was an unfailing passion with La Bruyere.
In another place he says: "The author who only considers the taste of
his own age is thinking more of himself than of his writings. We ought
always to be striving after perfection, and then posterit