Land. When that happens, I shall descend from him in the direct line."
One would think that a child could perceive this to be a satire at the
profiteers of the age, who invented ancestors, and so a child would
to-day, but in the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century it was
not safe to be funny. In particular, nonsense--the divine charm of
which we now admit--had not been acclimatized, and was looked upon
with grave displeasure. It wrings the heart that when Goldsmith, in a
purple coat, pretended to think himself more attractive than the
Jessamy Bride, his contemporaries severely censured this as an
instance of his "vanity."

So the fools and fops of La Bruyere's time thought or pretended to
think that he was seriously claiming to be of noble birth. Nothing was
further from his intention; no La Bruyere had taken part in the
Crusades, any more than any member of Charles Lamb's family had been
Pope of Rome. The moralist's father, Louis de La Bruyere, was
Comptroller-General of Rents of the Hotel de Ville of Paris; his
mother was an attorney's daughter. The eldest of five, he was born on
August 17, 1645, in the centre of old Paris, close to the church of St.
Christopher. It is only of late years that this fact has been
discovered, and there are still immense blanks in the life of La
Bruyere during which he disappears from us altogether, engulfed in the
lanes of the Cite, not because of any adventurous mystery, but simply
because of his total lack of adventure. There has scarcely lived a
great man of letters in comparatively recent times about whose life
there is so little to relate as about that of La Bruyere. He is
believed to have gone to school to the Fathers of the Oratory, but
even that is not certain. His knowledge of Greek is thought to prove
it, but, though the Oratorians were admirable Hellenists, surely Greek
could be learned elsewhere.

When he was twenty, he passed his examination in law in Orleans, and,
coming back to Paris, practised as a lawyer for eight or nine years.
He was concerned in no famous case, it is supposed, since his name is
never mentioned in the gossip of the time. He inherited a competence
from his father, and probably lived an idle life, diversified by a
little legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographer
says, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to a
meditative existence." When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisis
came. By some means or other, he secu