A careful scholar, M. Ernest Jouy, was led by a passage in a seventeenth-century MS. to make investigations which seem to have proved that La Rochefoucauld was acquainted with an English book of edification and even that he deigned to make use of it in the fashioning of his famous "Maximes." This was "The Mystery of Self-Deceiving," published in 1615 by a semi-nonconformist Puritan divine, Daniel Dyke, minister of Coggeshall in Essex, and translated obscurely into French by a certain Vernulius. Of the original work Fuller wrote, "It is a book which will be owned for a truth while men have any badness in them, and will be owned as a treasure whilst they have any goodness in them." It is, certainly, an amazing thing to find that this clumsy old treatise of English divinity was apparently possessed as a treasure by the most elegant and the most sceptical of Frenchmen. La Rochefoucauld may be conceived as saying to the practical divines of Port Royal, "Your work is confused and thwarted by the vast prevalence of rubbish under which morals are concealed. I will help you to force the people who talk so glibly of humanity and pity, of rectitude and amiability, to dissect the real bodies of egotism to which they give those names. I put Man in the pillory of self-judgment; it is for you to deal evangelically with what remains of his temperament when he comes down out of the ordeal." To do this, La Rochefoucauld prepared, with infinite patience and with the conscientiousness of a great literary artist, his sheaf of Maxim-arrows, ready to shoot them, one by one, into the gross heart of _amour-propre_. What, then, were the reflexions which, now settled in Paris, and secure from the rough world in the recesses of Mme de Sable's _salon_, the Duke began to fashion and to polish? A maxim is a formula, which comprehends the whole truth on a particular subject. Coleridge says, in his "Table Talk," that a maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact; we may add that it is final, it goes as far as it can possibly go, and contains the maximum of truth in the minimum of verbiage. If we take some of the most cynical and savage maxims of La Rochefoucauld we may see that conciseness could proceed no further: for instance, "Virtue is a rouge that women add to their beauty"; or "Pride knows no law and self-love no debt"; or "The pleasure of love is loving." The ingenuity of man has not devised a mode of saying those particular things as exactly in fewer words. They reach the maximum of conciseness, and are therefore called maxims.