hen La Bruyere died, Steele was already an author,
and what is more, a moralist. It is impossible not to believe that he
had been reading the "Caracteres" when it occurred to him that he
might procure himself "a most exquisite pleasure," by framing
"Characters of Domestic Life."

The ladies may hold it to be an excuse for our French moralist that he
was a confirmed and impenitent bachelor. He thought that marriage
enchained a philosopher, and would have said, in the words of Rudyard
Kipling, "He rideth the faster who rideth alone," Boileau, after a
visit from La Bruyere, remarked that nature had not consented to make
him so agreeable as he wished to be. It seems that he was shy and
gauche, and that he strove to conceal these defects by occasional
outbursts of a dreadful playfulness. There are stories about his
behaviour in the House of Conde, which if they are true seem to carry
eccentricity beyond the bounds of what is permitted even to a
philosopher. Nevertheless, contemporaries report that, in spite of his
plain features and his "look of a common soldier" (a dreadful thing to
say in the seventeenth century), the ladies ran after him. I am afraid
that when they did so, he repulsed them. He says about love none of
the charming things which he says about friendship, such as "To be
with those we are fond of, that is enough; to dream, to speak to them,
to say nothing to them, to think about them, to think of indifferent
things, but in their presence,--all is equally pleasant." Or this:
"Pure friendship has a flavour which is beyond the taste of those who
are born mediocre." Or again. "There ought to be, deep down in the
heart, inexhaustible wells of sorrow in readiness for certain losses."
The tenderness of such thoughts as these may surely outweigh the
dryness of the portraits of Corinne and Clarice.

The career of our moralist, after the publication of his single book,
was a short one. His startling success as a writer irresistibly
pointed him out as a candidate for election to the French Academy, but
here he was met by the barbed wire of jealousy and exasperated vanity.
He had laughed at too many pretentious mandarins to hope to escape
their resentment. At last, in 1693, but alas! at the expense of a vast
deal of intrigue on the part of his illustrious protectors, he stormed
that reluctant fortress. In his Reception Discourse, he revenged
himself on his enemies by firing volley after volley of irony into
their ranks,