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82 The preceding remarks lead me, by a natural connection of ideas (to which I am here much more inclined to attend than to the order of dates), to another writer of the seventeenth century, whose influence over the literary and philosophical taste of France has been far greater than seems to be commonly imagined. I allude to the Duke of La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims and Moral Reflections.

Voltaire was, I believe, the first who ventured to assign to La Rochefoucauld the preeminent rank which belongs to him among the French classics. “One of the works,” says he, “which contributed most to form the taste of the nation to a justness and precision of thought and expression, was the small collection of maxims by Francis Duke of La Rochefoucauld. Although there be little more than one idea in the book, that self-love is the spring of all our actions, yet this idea is presented in so great a variety of forms, as to be always amusing. When it first appeared, it was read with avidity; and it contributed, more than any other performance since the revival of letters, to improve the vivacity, correctness, and delicacy of French composition.”

Another very eminent judge of literary merit (the late Dr Johnson) was accustomed to say of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, that it was almost the only book written by a man of fashion, of which professed authors had reason to be jealous. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider the unwearied industry of the very accomplished writer, in giving to every part of it the highest and most finished polish which his exquisite taste could bestow. When he had committed a maxim to paper, he was in use to circulate it among his friends, that he might avail himself of their critical animadversions; and, if we may credit Segrais, altered some of them no less than thirty times, before venturing to submit them to the public eye.

That the tendency of these maxims is, upon the whole, unfavourable to morality, and that they always leave a disagreeable impression on the mind, must, I think, be granted. At the same time, it may be fairly questioned, if the motives of the author have in general been well understood, either by his admirers or his opponents. In affirming that self-love is the spring of all our actions, there is no good reason for supposing that he meant to deny the reality of moral distinctions as a philosophical truth;—a supposition quite inconsistent with his own fine and deep remark, that hypocrisy is itself an homage which vice renders to virtue. He states it merely as a fact, which, in the course of his experience as a man of