Bishop Butler, on the other hand, blames the book in no measured terms. "There is a strange affectation," says the bishop, "in some people of explaining away all particular affection, and representing the whole life as nothing but one continued exercise of self-love. Hence arise that surprising confusion and perplexity in the Epicureans of old, Hobbes, the author of 'Reflexions Morales,' and the whole set of writers, of calling actions interested which are done of the most manifest known interest, merely for the gratification of a present passion." The judgment the reader will be most inclined to adopt will perhaps be either that of Mr. Hallam, "Concise and energetic in expression, reduced to those short aphorisms which leave much to the reader's acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . . yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely fails to generate." Or that of Addison, who speaks of Rochefoucauld "as the great philosopher for administering consolation to the idle, the curious, and the worthless part of mankind." We are fortunately in possession of materials such as rarely exist to enable us to form a judgment of Rochefoucauld's character. We have, with a vanity that could only exist in a Frenchman, a description or portrait of himself, of his own painting, and one of those inimitable living sketches in which his great enemy, Cardinal De Retz, makes all the chief actors in the court of the regency of Anne of Austria pass across the stage before us.