It is time, however, to present the famous book in which all these investigations were noted, the cabinet where all these butterflies and less beautiful insect-forms were exhibited. The final title of it is "Characters; or, the Manners of this Age." It was published in January 1688, but, as is believed, had been begun nearly thirty years earlier, and slowly finished, the final revision and arrangement dating from 1686 and 1687. The book, like so many of the world's masterpieces, is short, and a fashionable novelist of to-day could scribble in a fortnight as many words as it contains. But there is not a careless phrase nor a hurried line in the whole of it. I do not know in the range of literature a book more deliberately exquisite than the "Caracteres." It started, probably, with the jotting down of social remarks at long intervals. Then, I think, La Bruyere, always extremely fastidious, observed that the form of his writing was growing to resemble too much that of La Rochefoucauld, and so he began to diversify it with "portraits." These had been in fashion in Paris for more than a generation, but La Bruyere invented a new kind of portrait. He says, on the very first page of the "Caracteres," "you make a book as you make a clock"; he ought to have said, "I make _my_ book," for no other work is quite so clock-like in its variety of parts, its elaborate mechanism, and its air of having been constructed at different times, in polished fragments, which have needed the most workmanlike ingenuity to fit them together into an instrument that moves and, rings. What perhaps strikes us most, when we put down the "Caracteres" after a close re-perusal of one of the most readable books in all literature, is its extraordinary sustained vitality. It hums and buzzes in our memory long after we have turned the last page. We may expand the author's own mage, and compare it, not with a clock, but with a watchmaker's shop; it is all alive with the tick-tick of a dozen chronometers. La Bruyere's observations are noted in a manner that is disjointed, apparently even disordered, but it was no part of his scheme to present his maxims in a system. We shall find that he was incessantly improving his work, revising, extending and weighing it. He was one of those timid men who surprise us by their crafty intrepidity. It was dangerous to publish sarcastic "portraits" of well-known influential people, and there are few of these in the first edition, but when the success of the book was once confirmed these were made more and more prominent. It was not until the eighth edition, of 1694, that La Bruyere ventured to print the following study of one of the most influential men of letters of that day. Fontenelle-- THE PORTRAIT OF CYDIAS