knowledge of French, will undertake easily to find English
equivalents for such distinctions as are expressed in the following
phrases--Esprit juste, esprit étendu, esprit fin, esprit délié, esprit
de lumière. These numerous distinctions are the evidence, as Stewart
says, of the attention paid by the cultivated classes to delicate
shades of mind and feeling. Compare with them the colloquial use of
our terribly overworked word "clever." Society and conversation have
never been among us the school of reflection, the spring of literary
inspiration, that they have been in France. The English rule has
rather been like that of the ancient Persians, that the great thing is
to learn to ride, to shoot with the bow, and to speak the truth. There
is much in it. But it has been more favourable to strength than to
either subtlety or finish.

One of the most commonly known of all books of maxims, after the
Proverbs of Solomon, are the Moral Reflections of La Rochefoucauld.
The author lived at court, himself practised all the virtues which
he seemed to disparage, and took so much trouble to make sure of the
right expression that many of these short sentences were more than
thirty times revised. They were given to the world in the last half
of the seventeenth century in a little volume which Frenchmen used
to know by heart, which gave a new turn to the literary taste of the
nation, and which has been translated into every civilised tongue. It
paints men as they would be if self-love were the one great mainspring
of human action, and it makes magnanimity itself no better than
self-interest in disguise.

"Interest," he says, "speaks all sorts of tongues and
plays all sorts of parts, even the part of the disinterested."