‘It is well to be merry and wise,’ &c.

Let us be merry as the poor cripple, who bore his sufferings so well, and let us be wise too.  There is a lesson for gay and grave in the life of Scarron, the laugher.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 27:  Coadjuteur.—­A high office in the Church of Rome.]

    FRANCOIS DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULT AND THE DUC DE SAINT-SIMON.

  Rank and Good Breeding.—­The Hotel de Rochefoucault.—­Racine and
      his Plays.—­La Rochefoucault’s Wit and Sensibility.—­Saint
      Simon’s Youth.—­Looking out for a Wife.—­Saint-Simon’s Court
      Life.—­The History of Louise de la Valliere.—­A mean Act of
      Louis Quatorze.—­All has passed away.—­Saint-Simon’s Memoirs of
      His Own Time.

The precursor of Saint-Simon, the model of Lord Chesterfield, this ornament of his age, belonged, as well as Saint-Simon, to that state of society in France which was characterised—­as Lord John Russell, in his ‘Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans,’ tells us—­by an idolatry of power and station.  ‘God would not condemn a person of that rank,’ was the exclamation of a lady of the old regime, on hearing, that a notorious sinner, ‘Pair de France,’ and one knows not what else, had gone to his account impenitent and unabsolved; and though the sentiment may strike us as profane, it was, doubtless, genuine.

Rank, however was often adorned by accomplishments which, like an exemption from rules of conduct, it almost claimed as a privilege.  Good-breeding was a science in France; natural to a peasant, even, it was studied as an epitome of all the social virtues. ‘N’etre pas poli’ was the sum total of all dispraise:  a man could only recover from it by splendid valour or rare gifts; a woman could not hope to rise out of that Slough of Despond to which good-breeding never came.  We were behind all the arts of civilization in England, as Francois de Rochefoucault (we give the orthography of the present day) was in his cradle.  This brilliant personage, who combined the wit and the moralist, the courtier and the soldier, the man of literary tastes and the sentimentalist par excellence, was born in 1613.  In addition to his hereditary title of duc, he had the empty honour, as Saint-Simon calls it, of being Prince de Marsillac, a designation which was lost in that of De la Rochefoucault—­so famous even to the present day.  As he presented himself at the court of the regency, over which Anne of Austria nominally presided, no youth there was more distinguished for his elegance or for the fame of his exploits during the wars of the Fronde than this youthful scion of an illustrious house.  Endowed by nature with a pleasing countenance, and, what was far more important in that fastidious region, an air of dignity, he displayed wonderful contradictions in his character and bearing.  He had, says Madame