e by the most elegant and the most sceptical of
Frenchmen.

La Rochefoucauld may be conceived as saying to the practical divines
of Port Royal, "Your work is confused and thwarted by the vast
prevalence of rubbish under which morals are concealed. I will help
you to force the people who talk so glibly of humanity and pity, of
rectitude and amiability, to dissect the real bodies of egotism to
which they give those names. I put Man in the pillory of
self-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remains
of his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal."

To do this, La Rochefoucauld prepared, with infinite patience and with
the conscientiousness of a great literary artist, his sheaf of
Maxim-arrows, ready to shoot them, one by one, into the gross heart of
_amour-propre_. What, then, were the reflexions which, now settled in
Paris, and secure from the rough world in the recesses of Mme de
Sable's _salon_, the Duke began to fashion and to polish? A maxim is a
formula, which comprehends the whole truth on a particular subject.
Coleridge says, in his "Table Talk," that a maxim is a conclusion upon
observation of matters of fact; we may add that it is final, it goes
as far as it can possibly go, and contains the maximum of truth in the
minimum of verbiage. If we take some of the most cynical and savage
maxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceed
no further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to their
beauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "The
pleasure of love is loving." The ingenuity of man has not devised a
mode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. They
reach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims.

It is very unusual in the history of literature to be able to point to
a man of genius as the positive founder of a class of work. When we
look closely into the matter, we are sure to find that there was an
obscure predecessor, a torch-bearer who lighted up the path. Even
Shakespeare has Marlowe in front of him, and in front of Marlowe are
Greene and Peele. Several poets were inspired by the story of the fall
of the rebel angels before Milton took up "Paradise Lost" and seized
that province as his own by conquest. In like manner, La Rochefoucauld
seems to us in a general view, and seemed indeed to his own Parisian
contemporaries, to have invented a new art in the production of his
"Maximes." But, in trut