That sound used to be called a “liquid,” in which class m, n, and r were included. This arrangement was unsatisfactory so far as m and n are concerned, for they have nothing common in their formation with the others. But r and l are very closely akin. They are both dentals —or more accurately front palatals—produced by raising the point of the tongue to the front part of the palate, immediately behind the gums. They differ in this: for r a small aperture is left over the tip of the tongue by which the air escapes; but for l the tongue reaches the top of the palate, but does not rest (as for r) against the sides of the mouth, and the voice escapes laterally by these side-apertures. The slightness of the difference in the positions of the mouth for these two sounds explains their exchangeableness. Perhaps the most remarkable variation of the l sound is that which is heard in Welsh and denoted by ll, in such words as Llanberis, Llangollen, &c. An Englishman commonly sounds this as thl, which is certainly not right. But the best authorities on phonetics are not agreed as to the precise nature of the sound. Mr Ellis thinks that it is produced by laying the left side of the tongue against the whole of the palate, and then forcibly ejecting the breath along the right side. But he admits that the sound thus produced differs very little from a voiceless or surd l (the common l is sonant), which stands therefore to l in the same relation as f does to v, or wh (really hui) to w. A simpler modification of the l sound is that heard in the Italian “gli” or in the Spanish “llano”; it is formed by raising the middle part of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, not the point against the front part of the palate, as for the ordinary I.

The peculiar nature of the l sound renders it apt to fall out before consonants with which it is inconsistent; this is specially seen in French plurals, such as “chevaux” from “cheval.” It is also common, but sporadic, in English; e,g., in “walk,” “talk,” “palm,” “alms,” “half,” “would,” &c. As is frequently the case with such vanishing sounds, it has sometimes intruded through false analogy in words with which it has nothing to do, e.g., in “could” (Old English “coude ”), and rather strangely in some words of Latin origin, e.g., participle, principle. The form of the letter L has varied slightly, but has always consisted of two straight lines at an angle. In Greek the form was generally A; and this has been preserved in the Cyrillic and Russian alphabets. But in the western Greek alphabet the form was generally L ; and this appears in old Roman inscriptions, passing by degrees into the right angle with which we are familiar.

LAeSTRYGONES, a mythic race of giants, mentioned in the Odyssey. After leaving the island of Aeolus, Ulysses reached in six days the coast of the Laestrygonians and the city of Lamus, where the paths of day and night approach so close that a sleepless man might make double wages by herding continuously, watching one flock while the other rested. This feature of the tale obviously contains some hint of the long nightless summer in the Arctic regions, which perhaps penetrated to the Greeks with the merchants who fetched amber from the Baltic coasts. The Laestrygonians were cannibals; and, when three sailors sent as scouts incautiously entered the city, the king Antiphates ate one and the people pursued the others to the ships. As the vessels tried to escape from the harbour, the giants pelted them with masses of rock, and sunk all except the one in which Ulysses was. The Laestrygonians must be a mythic multiplication of the one ultimate demonic being who is called their king, just as the kindred race of the Cyclopes is a multiplication of the single one-eyed sun god Polyphemus, the Cyclops par excellence. The name Antiphates is a fanciful one, but the other name Lamus takes us into a religious world where we can trace the origin of the legend, and observe the god of an older religion becoming the subject of fairy tales in a later period (see Lamia). Among the Greeks it was usual to place the country of the Laestrygones in Sicily, either beside Etna or towards the north-west promontory of the island; but, on the other hand, Horace and other Latin authors speak of them as living in southern Latium, near Formiae.

See H. van Berkum, De Lαbαdic eη de Labadisten, Sneek, 1851; Goebel, Geseh. d. Christi. Lebens in der rheinisdi-westphälischen Kirche, Coblentz, 1852; Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus, Leyden, 1879; Ritschi, Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. i., Bonn, 1880; and especially Peter Yvon, Abrégé précis de la vie et de la conduite et des vrais sentiments de feu Mr de Labadie, and Anna Maria v. Schiirman, Eucleria, Altona, 1673, 1678.

“Quand la Bruyère se présente Pourquoi faut il crier haro?

Pour faire un nombre de quarante Ne falloit il pas un zéro ?”

His unpopularity was, however, chiefly confined to the subjects of his sarcastic portraiture, and to the hack writers of the time, of whom he was wont to speak with a disdain only surpassed by that of Pope. His description of the leading newspaper of the day as “immédiatement au dessous du rien” is the best remembered specimen of these unwise attacks which, both in France and England, retarded the establishment of an independent profession of letters for many years. La Bruyère’s discourse of admission at the Academy was, like his admission itself, severely criticized, yet it is certainly one of the best of its kind. With the Caractères, the translation of Theophrastus, and a few letters, it completes the list of his literary work, with the exception of a curious and much-disputed posthumous treatise. La Bruyère died very suddenly, and not long after his admission to the Academy. He is said to have become suddenly deaf in an assembly of his friends, and, being carried home to the Hotel de Condé, to have expired of apoplexy a day or two afterwards. It is not surprising that, considering the recent panic about poisoning, the bitter personal enmities which he had excited, and the peculiar circumstances of his death, suspicions of foul play should have been entertained, but there seems to be no foundation for them. Two years after his death appeared certain Dialogues sur le Quiétisme, alleged to have been found among his papers incomplete, and to have been completed by the editor. As these dialogues are far inferior in literary merit to La Bruyère’s other works, their genuineness has been denied. But the straightforward and circumstantial account of their appearance given by their editor, the Abbé Dupin, a man of acknowledged probity, the intimacy of La Bruyère with Bossuet, whose views in his contest with Fénelon these dialogues are designed to further, and the entire absence at so short a time after the alleged author’s death of the least protest on the part of his friends and representatives, seem to be decisive in their favour.

Although for reasons to be given shortly it is permissible to doubt whether the value of the Caractères has not been somewhat exaggerated by traditional French criticism, they deserve beyond all question a high place among the great works of French literature. The plan of the book is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel and skilful combination of existing elements. That the little treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the first idea of it is doubtless true, but only a very small part of the Frenchman’s work is due to the Greek. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch painting of Theophrastus La Bruyère combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne essay, of the Pensées and Maximes of which Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar 17th century product, the portrait or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual. The result was quite unlike anything that had been before seen, and it has not been exactly reproduced since, though the essay of Addison and Steele resembles it very closely, especially in the introduction of fancy portraits. In the titles of his work and in its extreme desultoriness La Bruyère reminds the reader of Montaigne, but he aimed too much at sententiousness to attempt even the apparent continuity of the great essayist. The short paragraphs of which his chapters consist are made up of maxims proper, of criticisms literary and ethical, and above all of the celebrated sketches of individuals baptized with names taken from the plays and romances of the time. These last are undoubtedly the great feature of the work, and that which gave it its immediate if not its enduring popularity. They are wonderfully piquant, extraordinarily life-like in a certain sense, and must have given great pleasure or more frequently exquisite pain to the originals, who were in many cases unmistakable and in most recognizable by a society which held to the full Madame de Sévigné’s views of the usefulness of “le prochain” as a butt for satirical observation. But there is something wanting in them. The criticism of Charpentier, who received La Bruyère at the Academy, and who was of the opposite faction, has usually been dismissed as one-sided, but it is in fact fully justified as far as it goes. La Bruyère literally “est [trop] descendu dans le particulier.” He has neither like Molière embodied abstract peculiarities in a single life-like type, nor has he like Shakespeare made the individual pass sub speciem aeternitatis, and serve as a type while retaining his individuality. He is a photographer rather than an artist in his portraiture. So too his maxims, admirably as they are expressed, and exact as their truth often is, are on a lower level than those of La Rochefoucauld, which, rather unwisely, they sometimes follow very closely. Beside the sculpturesque precision, the Roman brevity, the profoundness of ethical intuition “piercing to the accepted hells beneath,” of the great Frondeur, La Bruyère has the air of a literary petit-maître dressing up superficial observation in the finery of esprit. It is indeed only by comparison that he loses, but then it is by comparison that he is usually praised. There is no doubt that his abundant wit and his personal “malice” have done much to give him his rank in French literature, but much must also be allowed to his purely literary merits. With Racine and Massillon he is probably the very best writer of what is somewhat arbitrarily styled classical French. He is hardly ever incorrect—the highest merit in the eyes of a French academic critic. He is always well-bred, never obscure, rarely though sometimes “precious” in the turns and niceties of language in which he delights to indulge, in his avowed design of attracting readers by form now that in point of matter “tout est dit.” It ought to be added to his credit that he was sensible of the folly of impoverishing French by ejecting old words. His chapter on “Les ouvrages de 1’esprit” contains much good criticism, though it shows that, like most of his contemporaries except Fénelon, he was lamentably ignorant of the literature of his own tongue.

The editions of La Bruyère, both partial and complete, have been extremely numerous. Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du Grec, avec les Caractères et les Moeurs de ce Siècle, appeared for the first time in 1688, being published by Michallet, to whose little daughter, according to tradition, La Bruyère gave the profits of the book. Two other editions, little altered, were published in the same year. In the following year, and in each year until 1694, with the exception of 1693, a fresh edition appeared, and, in all these five, additions, omissions, and alterations were largely made. A ninth edition, not much altered, was put forth in the year of the author’s death. The Academy speech appeared in the eighth edition. The Quietist dialogues were published in 1698; most of the letters, including those addressed to Condé, not till 1867. In the last thirty or forty years numerous editions of the complete works have appeared, notably those of Walckenaer (1845), Servois (1867), Asselineau (a scholarly reprint of the last original edition, 1872), and finally Chassang (1876); the last is one of the most generally useful, as the editor has collected almost everything of value in his predecessors. The literature of “keys” to La Bruyère is extensive and apocryphal. Almost everything that can be done in this direction and in that of general illustration was done by the late Μ. Edouard Fournier in his learned and amusing Comédie de La Bruyère. (G. SA. )

Besides the Comptes Rendus and ∖Eq Exposé Justificatif (three parts, 1766-67), written in prison, La Chalotais was the author of an Essai d'Education Nationals (1763), a work extravagantly praised by Voltaire. It was written in view of the disorganization in matters educational that would follow the expected expulsion of the Jesuits from France.

La Fayette was nineteen years of age and a captain of dragoons when the English colonies in America proclaimed their independence. “At the first news of this quarrel,’’ he afterwards wrote in his memoirs, “my heart was enrolled in it.” The count de Broglie, whom he consulted, discouraged his zeal for the cause of liberty. “I have seen your uncle die in the wars of Italy; I witnessed your father’s death at the battle of Minden; and I will not be accessory to the ruin of the only remaining branch of the family.” Finding his purpose unchangeable, however, the count presented the young enthusiast to the Baron de Kalb, who was also seeking service in America, and through Deane, an American agent in Paris, an arrangement was concluded, December 7,1776, by which La Fayette was to enter the American service as major-general. At this critical moment the news arrived of a series of grave disasters to the American arms, including the evacuation of New York. La Fayette’s friends again advised him to abandon his purpose. Even the American envoys, Franklin and Lee, who had superseded Deane the very day after the contract was signed, and who did not feel authorized to confirm his engagements, deemed it their duty to withhold any further encouragement of the plans of the marquis, and the king himself forbade his leaving. So far from being discouraged by these difficulties La Fayette proceeded to purchase a ship on his own account, and to invite such of his friends as were willing to share his fortunes. The British ambassador at Versailles remonstrated, and at his instance orders were issued to seize the ship then fitting out at Bordeaux, and La Fayette himself was arrested. But the ship was sent from Bordeaux to the neighbouring port of Pasajes in Spain, La Fayette escaped from the custody of his guards in disguise, and before a second lettre de cachet could reach him he was afloat with eleven chosen companions. Though two British cruisers had been sent in pursuit of him, he effected a safe landing near Georgetown in South Carolina, after a tedious voyage of nearly two months, and hastened to Philadelphia, then the seat of government of the colonies.

When this lad of nineteen, with the command of only what little English he had been able to pick up on his voyage, presented himself to the Congress of the Revolution, then sitting in Philadelphia, with Deane’s authority to demand a commission of the highest rank after the commander-in-chief, it is not surprising that his reception seemed to him a little chilly. Nor did he then know all the disadvantages under which he presented himself. Deane’s contracts were so numerous, and for officers of such high rank, that it was quite impossible for Congress t) ratify them without injustice to Americans who had become entitled by their service to promotion. La Fayette appreciated the situation as soon as it was explained to him, and immediately addressed a note to the president of Congress, in which he expressed his desire to be permitted to serve in the American army upon two conditions,—that he should receive no pay, and that he should act as a volunteer. These terms were so different from those made by other foreigners, they had been attended with such substantial sacrifices, and they promised such substantial indirect advantages, that Congress had no hesitation in passing a resolution, on the 31st of July 1777, “that his services be accepted, and that, in consideration of his zeal, illustrious family, and connexions, he have the rank and commission of major-general of the United States.” Next day La Fayette met Washington, who invited him to make the quarters of the commander-in-chief his own, and to consider himself at all times as one of his family. This invitation, as useful as it was flattering to the young officer, was joyfully accepted, and thus commenced a friendship which only death terminated. La Fayette was now anxious to have active employment, but it appeared that Congress intended his appointment as purely honorary, and the question of giving him a command was left entirely to Washington’s discretion. At the time La Fayette went into camp the British commander was trying to secure possession of Philadelphia and the line of the Hudson from the Canadian frontier to New York, which, if accomplished, might prove fatal to the American cause. By the capture of Burgoyne at Saratoga, on the 17th of October 1777, that portion of the scheme was effectually spoiled. In the southern campaign the British arms were more fortunate. The fall of Philadelphia was one of the immediate results of the battle of Brandywine on the 11th of September. This was the first battle in which La Fayette was engaged, and in an attempt to rally his troops in their retreat he had the good fortune to receive a musket ball in his leg. We say good fortune, for it doubtless secured him what of all things in the world he most desired, the command of a division—the immediate result of a communication from Washington to Congress of November 1, 1777, in which among other things he said :—

“The Marquis de la Fayette is extremely solicitous of having a command equal to his rank. I do not know in what light Congress will view the matter, but it appears to me, from a consideration of his illustrious and important connexions, the attachment which he has manifested for our cause, and the consequences which his return in disgust might produce, that it will be advisable to gratify his wishes, and the more so as several gentlemen from France who came over under some assurances have gone back disappointed in their expectations. His conduct with respect to them stands in a favourable point of view,—having interested himself to remove their uneasiness and urged the impropriety of their making any unfavourable representations upon their arrival at home. Besides, he is sensible, discreet in his manners, has made great proficiency in our language, and from the disposition he discovered at the battle of Brandywine possesses a large share of bravery and military ardour.”

The recommendation of Washington was conclusive, and La Fayette’s happiness was now complete. Barely twenty years of age, he found himself invested with a most honourable rank, purchased by his blood in fighting at once to secure the independence of a strange people and to punish the enemies of his own. He had justified the boyish rashness which his friends deplored and his sovereign resented, and had already acquired a place in history.

Of La Fayette’s military career in the United States there is not much to be said. Though the commander of a division, he never had the command of many troops, and whatever military talents he possessed were not of the kind which appeared to conspicuous advantage on the theatre to which his wealth and family influence rather than his soldierly gifts had called him, He fought at the battle of Monmouth in 1778, and received from Congress a. formal recognition of his services in the field, and of his probably more valuable exertions in healing dissensions between the French and native officers. His retreat from Barren Hill was also commended as masterly.

The treaty of commerce and defensive alliance, signed by the insurgents and France on the 6th of February 1778, was promptly followed by a declaration of war by England against the latter, and La Fayette felt it to be his duty to ask leave to revisit France and copsuit his king as to the farther direction of his services. This leave was readily granted; it was not difficult for Washington to replace the major-general, but it was impossible to find another equally competent, influential, and devoted champion of the American cause near the court of Louis XVI. In fact, he went on a mission rather than a visit. He embarked in January 1779, and on the 4th of March following Franklin wrote to the president of Congress: “The Marquis de la Fayette, who during his stay in France has been extremely zealous on all occasions, returns again to fight for it. He is infinitely esteemed and beloved here, and I am persuaded will do everything in his power to merit a continuance of the same affection from America.”

La Fayette was absent from America about six months, and his return was the occasion of a complimentary resolution of Congress. From this time until October 1781 he was charged with the defence of Virginia, in which Washington gave him the credit of doing all that was possible with the forces at his disposal; and he showed his zeal by borrowing money from the bankers in Baltimore on his own account to provide his soldiers with necessaries. The battle of Yorktown, in which La Fayette bore an honourable if not a distinguished part, was the last serious trouble of the war, and terminated his military career in the United States. He immediately sought and obtained leave to return to France, where it was supposed he might be useful in the negotiations looking to a general peace, of which prospects had begun to dawn. He was also much occupied in the preparations for a combined French and Spanish expedition against some of the British West India Islands, of which he had been appointed chief of staff, and a formidable fleet had already assembled at Cadiz, when, on the 30th of November 1782, the preliminary treaties of peace between the several belligerents put an end to the war. To La Fayette was accorded the grateful privilege of first communicating this welcome intelligence to Congress. He returned to his native land one of the heroes of a noble conflict, and fortified with the most flattering testimonials from his commander-in-chief and from the Government he had served, which were crowned by a notification from the French minister of war that he should have the same rank in the army of his sovereign that he had held in America, his commission to date from the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. He visited the United States again in 1784, to gratify his curiosity as well as his affections, and while he remained—some five months— was the guest of the nation, and received every mark of public and private consideration which h⅛ hosts supposed would be acceptable.

La Fayette did not appear again in public life until 1787, when he took his seat in the Assembly of Notables. From this time till near the close of the Revolution he was a conspicuous figure in the history of France, and almost the only one who, at no stage of that cycle of horrors, seems to have lost his reason or his humanity.

When the States-General, convened after the Assembly of Notables had proved wholly unequal to its task, met at Versailles in May 1789 the throne was occupied by a shadow. The royal authority was gone. France was already, though few if any, and least of all the sovereign, suspected it, in full revolution. On the 11th of July 1789 La l⅜yette presented to the National Assembly, into which the States-General had been fused, a declaration of rights, modelled on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. The struggle between the expiring monarchy and popular sovereignty was already big with the horrors of the French Revolution. The palace and the assembly were guarded by troops; a national guard was organized, which soon embraced the whole kingdom, and numbered over three millions of men, the command of which was confided to La Fayette. For the succeeding three years, until the -end of the constitutional monarchy in 1792, his history is largely the history of France. His life was beset with inconceivable responsibility and perils, for he was ever the minister of humanity and order among a frenzied people who had come to regard order and humanity as phases of treason. He rescued the queen from the murderous hands of the populace on the 5th and 6th of October 1789, not to speak of multitudes of humbler victims who had been devoted to death. He risked his life in many unsuccessful attempts to rescue others. He was obliged to witness the butchery of Foulon, and the reeking heart of Berthier torn from his lifeless body and held up in triumph before him. Disgusted with enormities which he was powerless to prevent and could not countenance, he resigned his commission; but so impossible was it to replace him that he was induced to resume it. In the Constituent Assembly, of which he was a member, his influence was always felt in favour of Republican principles, for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for religious tolerance, for popular representation, for the establishment of trial by jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abolition of titles of nobility, and the suppression of privileged orders. When the Constitution was proclaimed, on the 14th of July 1790, the first anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille, he again and definitively resigned his command, and retired to private life. Shortly after his resignation he was invited by the friends of liberty with order to stand for the office of mayor of Paris. By a strange madness the remnants of the royal party supported his competitor Péthion, the most rancorous of Jacobins, and were for the royal family but too fatally successful.

The royalist party, and certain members of the royal family who had taken refuge in frontier states, were already intriguing with the Austrian Government to march an army into France and restore absolutism, while the king, after an unsuccessful attempt to escape from France, was reduced to the humiliating necessity of declaring war against Austria and her allies. Three armies of 50,000 each were levied. Of one of these the command was given to La Fayette. But it was with sad misgivings that the general left his country retreat to take this command. As he passed through Paris the president of the Assembly said to him in full session that “the nation would oppose to its enemies the constitution and La Fayette”; but what was to be expected of a war conducted by a king in secret league with the nation’s enemies, or of a legislature conspiring to destroy the king and constitution to which they had only just sworn allegiance and support? La Fayette’s loyalty to his king, to his constitution, and to his country seemed only to strengthen as the situation grew desperate. Four days before the outrages which occurred at the Tuileries on the 16th June 1792 he publicly denounced the Jacobin Club, and called upon the Assembly to suppress them. Henceforth he became the special object of Jacobin rage. On the 8th of August a motion was made to have him arrested, and tried as an enemy of his country. Though the motion was defeated by 446 votes against 224, scarce two days elapsed before tho palace was stormed, and the king and queen were sent to the prison from which they passed to the scaffold.

With the destruction of the constitution, the monarchy, and the Government, La Fayette’s occupation as the priest of liberty, humanity, and order was gone. He would have marched to Paris to defend the constitution, but his troops were too generally infected with the sentiments which triumphed in the disorders of the 10th of August. He was compelled to take refuge in the neutral territory of Liège, where he was taken by the Austrians and held as a prisoner of state for five years, first in Prussian and afterwards in Austrian prisons, in spite of the intercession of America and the pleadings of his wife. Napoleon, however, who called him a “noodle,” stipulated for his release, 19th September 1797. He was not allowed to return to France by the Directory; when he did, it was to vote against the life consulate of Napoleon, as he, later on, voted against the imperial title. Many years of his life were then spent in retirement at the castle of La Grange. He was called from it to become vice-president of the Assembly, under Louis XVIΠ., before the battle of Waterloo. He afterwards sat for Meaux and became a frequent speaker upon foreign politics and military economy. But his early influence was gone, except in America, to which he returned in 1824, to be overwhelmed with popular applause and to be voted the sum of $200,000 and a township of land. During the Revolution of 1830 he again took command of the National Guard and pursued the same line* of conduct, with equal want of success, as in the first Revolution. In 1834 he made his last speech,—on political refugees. He died at Paris, May 20, 1834.

Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness in the world to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the marvellous vicissitudes of his singularly eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect. No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years so large a measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a “canine appetite” for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave even to rashness; his life was one of constant personal peril, and yet he never shrank from any danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the defenceless, to sustain tho law and preserve order.

See Mémoires historiques et pièces authentiques sur Μ. de La Fayette pour servir a l'histoire des révolutions, Paris, l’an second de la liberté française; La Fayette et la Révolution de 1830, histoire des choses et des hommes de Juillet, by B. Sarrans, Paris. 1832; Mémoires et Manuscrits de La Fayette, published by his family, 6 vols., Paris, 1837-38; and numerous eulogies aud monographs in French and English. (J. BI. )

Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much at Paris, but it was not till about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence, and he continued to hold it till 1672. It was not till he was past thirty that his literary career began, for he was by no means a precocious writer. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time— epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, &c. His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French letters was the superintendant Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connexion of his wife’s. Few people who had paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), in repayment possibly of the poem of Adonis which in 1658 he had, in manuscript, dedicated to the financier. He began too a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet’s famous country house. It was about this time, as has been said, that his wife’s property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything of his own; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him, especially as he had no establishment to maintain. In the same year he wrote a ballet, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages great and small, from the king downwards. Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary protégés, was not unfaithful to him, the well-known elegy Pleurez, Nymphes de Vaux, being by no means the only proof of his devotion. Indeed it is thought not improbable that a journey to Limoges which he took in 1663 in company with Jannart, and of which we have an account written to his wife, was not wholly spontaneous, as it certainly was not on Jannart’s part. · Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and himself had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force by the king, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres, which from what is known of the state of his private affairs it was probably impossible for him to pay. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Château Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine. Some of La Fontaine’s liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess, Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin’s nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then, let it be remembered, forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though, as was the habit of the time, much of his work was handed about iu manuscript long before it was regularly published. It was about this time that the quartette of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau, and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelle was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some of which are pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic of these is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain’s unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of Lι Fontaine’s version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669. Mean while the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orleans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Château Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating at the instance of the Port-Royalists as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the Prince de Conti. A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orleans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power, and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; he was free to amuse himself or to work as he liked, and as a matter of fact he worked steadily at his two different lines of poetry. Besides these he ventured on a third, in which he met and indeed deserved much less success,—that of theatrical composition.

The next event of importance in La Fontaine’s life, apart from the publication of his works, did not occur till after nearly ten years. In 1682 he was a man of more than sixty years old, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise were novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable therefore that he should present himself to the Academy, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends. He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not rtιerely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, “Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d’être sage.” His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute,.into the particulars of which there is no need to enter here, took place between the Academy and one of its members, Furetière, on the subject of the latter’s French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy’s corporate privileges. Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose fault probably was not so much that he was a principal offender as that the unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable. His second collection of these tales had been actually the subject of a police condemnation, of which, as may be supposed, Furetière did not fail to make the most. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel. Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated ancient-and-modern squabble in which Boileau and Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for favourable comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the ancient side. About the same time (1685-87) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d’Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendome, Chaulieu, and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. “J’ y allais” was La Fontaine’s answer. He had already undergone the process of conversion during a severe illness which befell him the year before. An energetic young priest, M. Poucet, had brought him, not indeed to understand, but to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes, and it is said that the destruction of a new play of some merit was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance. A pleasant story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon’s pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But though La Fontaine recovered for the time he was quite broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on the 13th of April 1695, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years, and his posterity lasted until the present century.

The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of myth or legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Tallemant des Réaux, the most indefatigable and least scrupulous (at best the least critical) of gossips. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it. We have neither space nor desire to recount the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, “Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere !” of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, <fcc. It may be taken for granted that much of this is apocryphal, and the companion anecdotes of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness, in company are still more doubtful. It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description which La Bruyère gives or is supposed to give of his social abilities, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyère’s chief literary enemy, who long prevented the author of the Caractères from entering the Academy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for such anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine’s attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartette, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon “le bonhomme” or “le bon” (by both which titles La Fontaine was familarly known), remarked to a bystander “nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n’effaceront pas le bonhomme.” They have not effaced him and will not do so, and the half contemptuous term “nos beaux esprits” marks well enough the sound judgment of the greatest of the four as to the merits of his companions.

The works of La Fontaine, the total bulk of which is considerable, fall no less naturally than traditionally into three divisions, the Fables, the Contes, and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally, the second to be known to all lovers of French literature, the third to be with a few exceptions practically forgotten. This distribution of the judgment of posterity is as usual just in the main, but not wholly. There are excellent things in the Oeuvres Diverses, but their excellence is only occasional, and it is not at the best equal to that of the Fables or the Contes. It was thought by contemporary judges who were both competent and friendly that La Fontaine attempted too many styles, and there is something in the criticism. His dramatic efforts are especially weak, and indeed it is evident that his forte lay neither in the dramatic delineation of character nor in the arrangement of dramatic action. The best pieces usually published under his name—Ragotin, Le Florentin, La Coupe Enchantée, were not originally fathered by him but by Champmeslé, the husband of the famous actress who captivated Racine and Charles de Sévigné. His avowed work was chiefly in the form of opera, a form of no great value at its best. Psyche has all the advantages of its charming story and of La Fontaine’s style, but it is perhaps principally interesting nowadays because of the framework of personal conversation already alluded to. The mingled prose and verse of the Songe de Vaux is not uninteresting, but its best things, such as the description of night—

“Laissant tomber les fleurs et ne les semant pas,” which has enchanted French critics, are little more than conceits, though as in this case sometimes very beautiful conceits. The elegies, the epistles, the epigrams, the ballades, contain many things which would be very creditable to a minor poet or a writer of vers de société, but even if they be taken according to the wise rule of modern criticism, each in its kind, and judged simply according to their rauk in that kind, they fall far below the merits of the two great collections of verse narratives which have assured La Fontaine’s immortality.

Between the actual literary merits of the two there is not much to choose, but the change of manners and the altered standard of literary decency has thrown the Contes into the shade. These tales are identical in general character with those which amused Europe from the days of the early fabliau writers through the period of the great Italian novelliert to that of the second great group of French tale-tellers ranging from Antoine de la Salle to Béroalde de Verville. Light love, the misfortunes of husbands, the cunning of wives, the breach of their vows by ecclesiastics, constitute the staple of their subject. In some respects La Fontaine is the best of such tale-tellers, while he is certainly the latest who deserves such excuse as may be claimed by a writer who does not choose indecent subjects from a deliberate knowledge that they are considered indecent and with a deliberate desire to pander to a vicious taste. No one who followed him in the style can claim this excuse; he can, and the way in which contemporaries of stainless virtue such as Madame de Sévigné speak of his work shows that though the new public opinion was growing up it was not finally accepted. In the Contes La Fontaine for the most part attempts little originality of theme. He takes his stories (varying them it is true in detail not a little) from Boccaccio, from Marguerite, from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, &c. He applies to them his marvellous power of easy sparkling narration, and his hardly less marvellous faculty of saying more or less outrageous things in the most polite and gentlemanly manner. These Contes have indeed certain drawbacks. They are not penetrated by the half pagan ardour for physical beauty and the delights of sense which animates and excuses the early Italian Renaissance. They have not the subtle mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appetite, which distinguishes the work of Marguerite and of the Pléiade. They are emphatically contes pour rire, a genuine expression of the esprit gaulois of the fabliau writers and of Rabelais, destitute of the grossness of envelope which had formerly covered that spirit. A comparison of “La Fiancee du Roi de Garbe” with its original in Boccaccio (especially if the reader takes Μ. Émile Montegut’s admirable essay as a commentary) will illustrate betteι ’ than anything else what they have and what they have not. Some writers have pleaded hard for the admission of actual passion of the poetical sort in such pieces as “La Courtisane Amoureuse,” but as a whole it must be admitted to be absent.

The Fables, with hardly less animation and narrative art than the Contes, are free from disadvantages (according to modern notions) of subject, and exhibit the versatility and fecundity of the author’s talent perhaps even more fully. La Fontaine had of course many predecessors in the fable and especially in the beast fable. In his first issue, comprising what are now called the first six books, he adhered to the path of these predecessors with some closeness; but in the later collections he allowed himself far more liberty, and it...

Bentivoglio exaggerates in saying that La Noue was as famous by his pen as by his sword. What writings he has left are of value enough, but it is not by them that he is remembered. He was the author of Discours Politiques et Militaires, 1587; Déclaration pour prise d’armes et la défense de Sedan et Jamets, 1588; Observations sur l'Histoire de Guicciardini, 2 vols., 1592; and notes on Plutarch’s Lives, which have not been published. His Correspondance was published in 1854. See La Vie de François, seigneur de La Noue, by Moyse Amirault, Leyden, 1661; Brantôme’s Vies des Capitaines Français; C. Vincen’s Les Héros de la Réforme: Fr. de La Noue (1875); and Haag, La France Protestante.

See Milet Mureau, Voyage de la Pérouse autour du Monde, Paris, 1797, 4 vols.; Peter Dillon, Narrative . . . . of a Voyage in the South Seas, London, 1829.

Somewhat earlier, La Rochefoucauld had taken his place in the salon of Madame de Sablé, a member of the old Rambouillet coterie, and the founder of a kind of successor to it. It was known that La Rochefoucauld, like almost all his more prominent contemporaries, had spent his solitude in writing memoirs, while the special literary employment of the Sablé salon was the fabrication of Sentences and Maximes. In 1662, however, more trouble than reputation, and not a little of both, was given to him by a surreptitious publication of his memoirs, or what purported to be his memoirs, by the Elzevirs. Many of his old friends were deeply wounded, and he hastened to deny flatly the authenticity of the publication, a denial which (as it seems, λvithout any reason) was not very generally accepted. Three years later (1665) he published, though without his name, the still more famous Maxims, which at once established him high among the men of letters of the time. About the same date began the friendship with Madame de la Fayette, which lasted till the end of his life. The glimpses which we have of him henceforward are chiefly derived from the letters of Madame de Sévigné, and, though they show him suffering agonies from gout, are on the whole pleasant. He had a circle of devoted friends; he was recognized as a moralist and man of letters of the first rank; he might have entered the Academy for the asking; and in the altered measure of the times his son the Prince de Marcillac, to whom some time before his death he resigned his titles and honours, enjoyed a considerable position at court. Above all, La Rochefoucauld was generally recognized by his contemporaries from the king downward as a type of the older noblesse as it was before the sun of the great monarch dimmed its brilliant qualities. This position he has retained until the present day. He died at Paris on the 17th of March 1680, of the disease which had so long tormented him.

La Rochefoucauld’s character, if considered without the prejudice which a dislike to his ethical views has sometimes occasioned, is thoroughly respectable and even amiable. Like almost all his contemporaries, he saw in politics little more than a chessboard where the people at large were but pawns, and the glory and profit were reserved to the nobility. The weight of testimony, however, inclines to the conclusion that he was unusually scrupulous in his conduct, and that bis comparative ill success in the struggle arose more from this scrupulousness than from anything else. He has been charged with irresolution, and there is some ground for admitting the charge so far as to pronounce him one of those the keenness of whose intellect, together with their apprehension of both sides of a question, interferes with their capacity as men of action. But there is no ground whatever for the view which represents the Maxims as the mere outcome of the spite of a disappointed intriguer, disappointed through his own want of skill rather than of fortune.

Interesting, however, as he is when considered as a man and as a typical figure of a brilliant and historically important class, his importance as a social and historical figure is far inferior to his importance as a man of letters. His work in this respect consists of three parts—letters, Memoirs, and the Maxims. The letters collected by the diligence of his latest editor exceed one hundred in number, and are biographically valuable, besides displaying not a few of his literary characteristics; but they need not further detain us. The Memoirs, when they are read in their proper form, yield in literary merit, in interest, and in value to no memoirs of the time, not even to those of Retz, between whom and La Rochefoucauld there was a strange mixture of enmity and esteem which resulted in a couple of most characteristic portraits. But their history is unique in its strangeness. It has been said that a pirated edition appeared in Holland, and this despite the author’s protest continued to be reprinted for some thirty years. It has been now proved beyond doubt or question to be a mere cento of the work of half a dozen different men, scarcely a third of which is La Rochefoucauld’s, and which could only have been possible at a time when it was the habit of persons who frequented literary society to copy pell-mell in commonplace books the MS. compositions of their friends and others. Some years after La Rochefoucauld’s tleath a new recension appeared, somewhat less incorrect than the former, but still largely adulterated, and this held its ground for more than a century. Only in 1817 did anything like a genuine edition (even then by no means perfect) appear. The Maxims, however, had no such fate. The author re-edited them frequently during his life, with alterations and additions; a few were added after Ids death, and it is usual now to print the whole of them, at whatever time they appeared, together. Thus taken, they amount to about seven hundred in number, in hardly any case exceeding half a page in length, and more frequently confined to two or three lines. The view of conduct which they illustrate is usually and not quite incorrectly summed up in the words “everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest.” Though not absolutely incorrect, the phrase is misleading. The Maxims are in no respect mere deductions from or applications of any such general theory. They are on the contrary independent judgments on different relations of life, different affections of the human mind, and so forth, from which, taken together, the general view may be deduced or rather composed. Sentimental moralists have loudly protested against this view, yet it is easier to declaim against it in general than to find a flaw in the several parts of which it is made up. With a few exceptions La Rochefoucauld’s maxims represent the matured result of the reflexion of a man deeply versed in the business and pleasures of the world, and possessed of an extraordinarily fine and acute intellect, on the conduct and motives which have guided himself and his fellows. There is as little trace in them of personal spite as of forfanterie de vice. But the astonishing excellence of the literary medium in which they are conveyed is even more remarkable than the general soundness of their ethical import. In uniting the four qualities of brevity, clearness, fulness of meaning, and point La Rochefoucauld has no rival. His Maxims are never mere epigrams; they are never platitudes; they are never dark sayings. He has packed them so full of meaning that it would be impossible to pack them closer, yet there is no undue compression; he has sharpened their point to the utmost, yet there is no loss of substance. The comparison which occurs most frequently, and which is perhaps on the whole the justest, is that of a bronze medallion, and it applies to the matter no less than to the form. Nothing is left unfinished, yet none of the workmanship is finical. The sentiment, far from being merely hard as the sentimentalists pretend, has a vein of melancholy poetry running through it which calls to mind the traditions of La Rochefoucauld’s devotion to the romances of chivalry. The maxims are never shallow; each is the text for a whole sermon of application and corollaries which any one of thought and experience can write. Add to all this that the language in which they are written is French, still at almost its greatest strength, and chastened but as yet not emasculated by the reforming influence of the 17th century, and it is not necessary to say more. To the literary critic no less than to the man of the world La Rochefoucauld ranks among the scanty number of pocket-books to be read and re-read with ever new admiration, instruction, and delight.

The editions of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims published in his lifetime bear the dates 1665 {editiο princeps), 1666, 1671, 1675, 1678. An important edition which appeared after his death in 1693 may rank almost with these. As long as the Memoirs remained in the state above described no edition of them need be mentioned, and none of the complete works was possible. There have been several editions more or less complete in the last seventy years, but they are all thrown into the shade by that of MM. Gilbert and Gourdault, 1868-81, in the series of Grands Écrivains de la France, 3 vols. This is complete as to the text, but a glossary and some other additional matters have yet to appear. The handsomest separate edition of the Maxims is the so-called Édition des Bibliophiles, 1870; but cheap and handy issues are plentiful.