em to deserve that
they should themselves not lack the bread which they have
sown." And in "Des Biens de Fortune" he says: "There are
sorrows in the world that grip the heart, there are men and
women who have nothing, not even bread, who shudder at the
approach of winter, who have learned the significance of
life, while others eat fruit forced out of due season, and
compel the soil and the seasons to indulge their
fastidiousness."]

It was a great advantage to La Bruyere, and a sign of his genius, that
he was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his
readers with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He is
persuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh and
sometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. He
feels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men and
women, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violent
and the rich. For this purpose, though he would tell them their
faults, he would not shut the gates of mercy in their faces. But how
admirably he himself puts it in his chapter "Des Jugements":--

"A man of talent and reputation, if he allows himself to be peevish
and censorious, scares young people, makes them think evil of virtue,
and frightens them with the idea of an excessive reform and a tiresome
strictness of conduct. If, on the other hand, he proves easy to get on
with, he sets a practical lesson before them, since he proves to them
that a man can live gaily and yet laboriously, and can hold serious
views without renouncing honest pleasures; so he becomes an example
which they find it possible to follow."

When we look round for an author of high importance on whom the
influence of La Bruyere was direct, we find the most obvious to be an
Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator." Addison was born
when La Bruyere was twenty-seven; when the "Caracteres" was published
he was an undergraduate at Queen's College, Oxford, walking in
meditation under the elms beside the Cherwell. Addison was not in
France until La Bruyere had been some months dead; there can have been
no personal intercourse between them; but he stayed at Blois for over
twelve months in 1699 and 1700, and during that time he was much in
company with the Abbe Phelippeaux, member of that family of friends
who had so efficiently supported La Bruyere's candidature to the
French Academy only six years before.