“A modern writer will generally prove to you that the ancients are inferior in two ways--by reason and example. The reason will be drawn from his own taste, and the examples from his own works.” Very neat both, but I think La Bruyère’s has the more comic turn. If the Duke had had less prudence, or more bitterness (with as much reason for it), we might have been able to compare his treatment of _la Cour_. But he hardly touches it. La Bruyère cannot leave it alone. “Let a favourite,” he says, “have a sharp eye on himself; for if he keep me in his ante-chamber a shorter time than usual; if his look be more open; if he frown less, listen more willingly, show me a little further from the door, I shall be thinking him in the way of losing credit; and I shall be right.” Then he breaks into this bitter reflection: “A man can have little resource in himself if he must fall into disgrace or be mortified in order to become more human, more tractable, less of a brute and more of a good fellow.”
There is a note very familiar to us in this:
“How comes it about that _Alciopus_ bows to me this morning, smiles, throws himself half-way out of the carriage window for fear of missing my eye? I am not a rich man--and I am on foot. By all the rules he ought not to have seen me. Is it not rather so that he himself may be seen in the same coach with a lord?”
Thackeray all over; but I don’t think Thackeray had it straight from _Les Caractères_. The first translation into English was in 1699, and by “Eustace Budgell, Esq.” There were many others--two, anonymous, in 1700 and 1702, one by Nicholas Rowe in 1709, one by “H. Gally” in 1725. Was not Budgell one of the _Spectator’s_ men? Steele and Addison both may have quarried in his version. Here is a specimen _Spectator_ paragraph:
“_Narcissus_ rises in the morning in order that he may go to bed at night. He takes his time for dressing like a woman, and goes every day regularly to mass at the _Feuillants_ or the _Minims_. He is an affable fellow, who may be counted on in a certain quarter of the town to take a _tierce_ or a _cinquième_ at Ombre or Reversi. So engaged you will see him in his chair for hours on end at _Aricia’s_, where every evening he will lay out his five gold pistoles. He reads punctually the _Gazette de Hollande_ and the _Mercure Galant_; he will have read his Cyrano, his des Marete, his Lesclache, Barbin’s story books, assorted poetry. He walks abroad with the ladies; he is serious in paying calls. He will do to-morrow what he does to-day and did yesterday; and after having so lived, so he will die.”