To correct all this, let us recall Helvetius’s saying that I have already quoted, which made so deep an impression on Jeremy Bentham:  “In order to love mankind, we must not expect too much from them.”  And let us remember that Fenelon, one of the most saintly men that ever lived, and whose very countenance bore such a mark of goodness that when he was in a room men found they could not desist from looking at him, wrote to a friend the year before he died, “I ask little from most men; I try to render them much, and to expect nothing in return, and I get very well out of the bargain.”

Chamfort I will leave, with his sensible distinction between Pride and Vanity.  “A man,” he says, “has advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.  The first is lofty, calm, immovable; the second is uncertain, capricious, unquiet.  The one adds to a man’s stature; the other only puffs him out.  The one is the source of a thousand virtues; the other is that of nearly all vices and all perversities.  There is a kind of pride in which are included all the commandments of God; and a kind of vanity which contains the seven mortal sins.”

I will say little of La Bruyere, by far the greatest, broadest, strongest, of French character-writers, because his is not one of the houses of which you can judge by a brick or two taken at random.  For those in whom the excitements of modern literature have not burnt up the faculty of sober meditation on social man, La Bruyere must always be one of the foremost names.  Macaulay somewhere calls him thin.  But Macaulay has less ethical depth, and less perception of ethical depth, than any writer that ever lived with equally brilliant gifts in other ways; and thin is the very last word that describes this admirable master.  If one seeks to measure how far removed the great classic moralists are from thinness, let him turn from La Bruyere to the inane subtleties and meaningless conundrums, not worth answering, that do duty for analysis of character in some modern American literature.  We feel that La Bruyere, though retiring, studious, meditative, and self-contained, has complied with the essential condition of looking at life and men themselves, and with his own eyes.  His aphoristic sayings are the least important part of him, but here are one or two examples:—­

  “Eminent posts make great men greater, and little
  men less.”

  “There is in some men a certain mediocrity of mind
  that helps to make them wise.”

  “The flatterer has not a sufficiently good opinion
  either of himself or of others.”

“People from the provinces and fools are always ready to take offence, and to suppose that you are laughing at them:  we should never risk a pleasantry, except with well-bred people, and people with brains.

  “All confidence is dangerous, unless it is complete,
  there are few circumstances in which it is not best
  either to hide all or to tell all.”