JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE translated Theophrastus and published his own “Characters” with his translations from the Greek in 1688. (“Les Caractères de Théophraste avec les Caractères et les Mœurs de ce Siècle.” Michallet. Paris.) As Sir Thomas Overbury’s little volume of “Characters,” suggested by those of Theophrastus, appeared seventy-four years (1614) before the date of the first edition of La Bruyère’s, the greater celebrity of the French wit scarcely entitles him to be called “the founder of the modern school of Theophrastus.” His own countrymen, however, will not admit the claim of any one else to rank with him in his class. In wit and sententiousness he is superior to Overbury, Earle, Fuller, and Felltham, the leading English exponents of the methods of Theophrastus, but the circumstance to which chiefly he owed his celebrity with his own generation is not an advantage in his work as it appeals to posterity. He sketched “Characters,” not as types of human nature, but as portraits of actual men and women, his friends, his enemies, or his rivals in the Parisian world of letters and politics. While the age in which he wrote was that of Bossuet, Fénelon, Boileau, Racine, Corneille, Fontenelle, the great Condé, and others scarcely less famous, those whose traits he described without naming them did not become typical under his pen. Thus while to Frenchmen this part of his work has an enduring antiquarian interest, it does not appeal to the general reader outside of France, as do his biting epigrams on the faults and foibles of common humanity. He seems to have set down his thoughts as they came into his mind, without attempting to give them any other connection than that of an underlying idea. He will condense a page of thought into a three-line epigram, or expand three lines into an essay of a page, at his own pleasure, without asking the reader’s consent. The result is pleasing, and though he deals too seldom with the good in human nature, the subtle quality of the wit with which he discovers and displays the evil prevents him from being classed either as a cynic or a scold.

  It is said that he was the master of Addison in literature; but if Addison learned from him subtlety in the display of wit, he did not learn the sarcasm which above everything else is characteristic of whatever La Bruyère writes in dealing with human nature. He lacks Addison’s good fellowship, but he is keener and more pungent than any writer of the Spectator school.

  He was born at Paris in August, 1645, and trained for the bar, but he supported himself chiefly by work in the government revenue service and as a tutor in the family of the Prince of Condé, with whom he was a favorite. When the first edition of the “Caractères” appeared in 1688, they were only three hundred and eighty-six in number; but as their popularity was immediate, he added to them in successive editions until in the ninth, which was in press at the time of his death (May 10th, 1696), they had been increased to over a thousand. The names of those he satirized were not given, but some were easily identified by their friends, and others maliciously by their enemies, so that La Bruyère’s increase in celebrity was at the expense of his popularity. He had a long struggle with his enemies in the academy before he finally gained admission. They voted him down three times in a single year, and on one occasion reduced the number of his supporters to seven. As Boileau, Bossuet, and Racine were among the seven who upheld him in his claim to a place among the “Immortals,” there is no room to complain that the judgment of posterity on him was not adequately represented in the contest.