dowry for his child. The bookseller hesitated for some time, but finally published it, and the sale of it was so large that he brought out one edition after another as quick as he could.

It is certain that the publication of the “Characters” in 1688 made its author many enemies, but he calmly pursued the even tenor of his way, and increased the number of his paragraphs during the remaining portion of his life.27

In 1691 he endeavoured to be elected a member of the French Academy, and to become the successor of Benserade,28 but failed, thanks to the number of his enemies, amongst whom probably Fontenelle and Thomas Corneille, the nephew and brother of the great poet Pierre Corneille, were the most active; yet in 1693 he was elected without having made the usual visits to the Academicians to solicit their votes,29 though his friends, Racine, Boileau, the secretary of state, de Pontchartrain,30 and others, used all their influence to ensure his nomination.

The speech he delivered at his reception seems not to have given general satisfaction, for La Bruyère defended the partisans of the classical and attacked those of the modern school, proclaimed Boileau a judicious critic, and hardly admitted Corneille to be the equal of Racine. This speech, preceded by a very satirical preface,31 in which he ridiculed his enemies under the name of “Theobalds,” was published with the eighth edition of the “Characters.”

But if he had bitter enemies he had also warm friends, amongst whom, besides the illustrious men I have already named, must be reckoned: Phélypeaux, the son of de Pontchartrain; the Marquis de Termes; Bossuet, and his nephew the Abbé Bossuet; Fénelon; de Malesieu; Renaudot; de Valincourt; Regnier-Desmarais; La Loubère, and Bouhier, nearly all present or future members of the French Academy; the poet Santeuil, and the historian Caton de Court.

We hardly know anything for certain of the character of La Bruyère except by the glimpses we get now and then in his book, or by what is told of him in some of the letters and writings of his friends and enemies. He was unmarried, and seems to have been a man of a modest disposition, fond of his books and his friends, polite in his manners, and willing to oblige. I imagine he must have felt it sometimes hard to be dependent on so fantastic, suspicious, half-demented a man as was the father of his former pupil, above all, after the death of the great Condé, which took place on the 8th of December 1686,32 and also to have disliked being made now and then the butt of courtiers33 his mental inferiors, but aristocratic superiors; hence he was often silent for fear of being laughed at.34

He was scarcely fifty when, according to some reports, he became suddenly deaf; a few days afterwards, during the night of the 10th of May 1696, he died of an attack of apoplexy at the hotel of the Condés at Versailles.

In 1699 were published some Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, attributed to La Bruyère; but as the editor, the Abbé du Pin, admitted he had partly altered them, as well as added some of his own, it is difficult to judge what was the original share of our author in their composition.

Only twenty-one authenticated letters of La Bruyère are in existence, of which seventeen are in the collection of the Duke dʼAumale, at Twickenham.