them, or else out of vengeance because these vices have played them some
sorry turn; but a little loftiness of soul, some knowledge of the heart,
a gentle and tranquil humour, will protect you against the risk of being
either surprised, or keenly wounded by them.'[50]

There is a tolerably obvious distinction between two principal ways of
examining character. One is a musing, subjective method of delineation,
in which the various shades and windings seem to reveal themselves with
a certain spontaneity, and we follow many recesses and depths in the
heart of another, such as only music stirs into consciousness in
ourselves. Besides this rarer poetic method, there is what may be
styled the diplomatist's method; it classifies characters objectively,
according to the kinds of outer conduct in which they manifest
themselves, and according to the best ways of approaching and dealing
with them. The second of these describes the spirit in which
Vauvenargues observed men. He is French, and not German, and belongs to
the eighteenth century, and not to the seventeenth or the nineteenth.
His _Characters_, very little known in this country, are as excellent as
any work in this kind that we are acquainted with, or probably as
excellent as such work can be. They are real and natural, yet while
abstaining as rigorously as Vauvenargues everywhere does from grotesque
and extravagant traits, they avoid equally the vice of presenting the
mere bald and sterile flats of character, which he that runs may read.
As we have said, he had the quality possessed by so few of those who
write about men; he watched men, and drew from the life. In a word, he
studied concrete examples and interrogated his own experience--the only
sure guarantee that one writing on his themes has anything which it is
worth our while to listen to. Among other consequences of this reality
of their source is the agreeable fact that these pictures are free from
that clever bitterness and easy sarcasm, by which crude and jejune