he rich is suddenly relieved by
the dreadful calm with which he reveals the horror of their
disappointments. He is never in the same mood, or adopting the same
tone, for two pages running. It is difficult in a translation to give
an idea of the surprising element in his style, but something of its
oddity may be preserved in such an attempt as this--

"There are creatures of God whom we call men, who have a soul which is
intelligence, and whose whole life is spent and whose whole attention
is centred in the sawing of marble. This is a very simple, a very
little thing. There are others who are amazed at this, but who
themselves are utterly useless, and who spend their days in doing
nothing at all. This is a still smaller thing than sawing marble."

English prose, which a century earlier had limped so far behind French
in clearness and conciseness, was rapidly catching its rival up, and
in the next generation was to run abreast with it. But if we wish to
see how far behind the best French writers our own best still were, we
need but compare the exquisite speed and elasticity of the
"Caracteres" with the comparative heaviness and slowness of a famous
Theophrastian essay published in the same year, 1688, namely the
"Character of a Trimmer." In the characteristics of a lively prose
artist, we shall have to confess La Bruyere nearer to Robert Louis
Stevenson than to his own immediate contemporary, Lord Halifax.

The surface of La Bruyere's writing is crisp and parched, but it is
easy by careful reading to crack it, and to discover the coolness, the
softness, the salutary humidity which lie beneath the satirical crust
of his irony. He is primarily a satirist, dealing as he says with the
vices of the human mind and the subterfuges of human self-deception.
He lays bare "the sentiments and the movements of men, exposing the
principles which actuate their malice and their frailty"; he aims at
showing that such is the native evil implanted in their souls that "no
one should any longer be surprised at the thousands of vicious or
frivolous actions with which their lives are crowded." We note him at
first as entirely devoted to these painful investigations, and we are
apt to confound his attitude with that of La Rochefoucauld, the weary
Titan, who sighs contemptuously as he holds up to censure the globe of
human _amour-propre_. But we do not begin to understand the attitude
of La Bruyere until we notice that there always is, in the p