La Bruyere, in the darkness of his pessimism, sometimes suggests Swift, especially in his sarcastically serious treatment of detail; but he was without the virulent bitterness of the great Dean.  In fact his indictment owes much of its impressiveness to the sobriety with which it is presented.  There is no rage, no strain, no over-emphasis; one feels as one reads that this is an impartial judge.  And, more than that, one feels that the judge is not only a judge, but also a human being.  It is the human quality in La Bruyere’s mind which gives his book its rare flavour, so that one seems to hear, in these printed words, across the lapse of centuries, the voice of a friend.  At times he forgets his gloom and his misanthropy, and speaks with a strange depth of feeling on friendship or on love.  ‘Un beau visage,’ he murmurs, ’est le plus beau de tous les spectacles, et l’harmonie la plus douce est le son de voix de celle que l’on aime.’  And then—­’Etre avec les gens qu’on aime, cela suffit; rever, leur parler, ne leur parler point, penser a eux, penser a des choses plus indifferentes, mais aupres d’eux tout est egal.’  How tender and moving the accent, yet how restrained?  And was ever more profundity of intimacy distilled into a few simple words than here—­’Il y a du plaisir a rencontrer les yeux de celui a qui l’on vient de donner’?  But then once more the old melancholy seizes him.  Even love itself must end.—­’On guerit comme on se console; on n’a pas dans le coeur de quoi toujours pleurer et toujours aimer.’  He is overwhelmed by the disappointments of life.—­’Les choses les plus souhaitees n’arrivent point; ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est ni dans le temps ni dans les circonstances ou elles auraient fait un extreme plaisir.’  And life itself, what is it? how does it pass?—­’Il n’y a pour l’homme que trois evenements:  naitre, vivre, et mourir; il ne se sent pas naitre, il souffre a mourir, et il oublie de vivre.’

The pages of La Bruyere—­so brilliant and animated on the surface, so sombre in their fundamental sense—­contain the final summary—­we might almost say the epitaph—­of the great age of Louis XIV.  Within a few years of the publication of his book in its complete form (1694), the epoch, which had begun in such a blaze of splendour a generation earlier, entered upon its ultimate phase of disaster and humiliation.  The political ambitions of the overweening king were completely shattered; the genius of Marlborough annihilated the armies of France; and when peace came at last it came in ruin.  The country was not only exhausted to the farthest possible point, its recuperation had been made well-nigh impossible by the fatal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which, in circumstances of the utmost cruelty, had driven into exile the most industrious and independent portion of the population.  Poverty, discontent, tyranny, fanaticism—­such was the legacy that Louis left to his country.  Yet that was not quite all.  Though, during the last years of the reign, French