It was a great advantage to La Bruyere, and a sign of his genius, that he was able to descend from the pulpit, and walk about among his readers with a smile, recognizing them as reasonable beings. He is persuasive; his forerunners had been denunciatory. He may be harsh and sometimes unjust, but he is never contemptuous to human nature. He feels that he is addressing a wide public of intelligent men and women, whom he would fortify against the moral tyranny of the violent and the rich. For this purpose, though he would tell them their faults, he would not shut the gates of mercy in their faces. But how admirably he himself puts it in his chapter "Des Jugements":-- "A man of talent and reputation, if he allows himself to be peevish and censorious, scares young people, makes them think evil of virtue, and frightens them with the idea of an excessive reform and a tiresome strictness of conduct. If, on the other hand, he proves easy to get on with, he sets a practical lesson before them, since he proves to them that a man can live gaily and yet laboriously, and can hold serious views without renouncing honest pleasures; so he becomes an example which they find it possible to follow." When we look round for an author of high importance on whom the influence of La Bruyere was direct, we find the most obvious to be an Englishman, and our own enchanting "Mr. Spectator." Addison was born when La Bruyere was twenty-seven; when the "Caracteres" was published he was an undergraduate at Queen's College, Oxford, walking in meditation under the elms beside the Cherwell. Addison was not in France until La Bruyere had been some months dead; there can have been no personal intercourse between them; but he stayed at Blois for over twelve months in 1699 and 1700, and during that time he was much in company with the Abbe Phelippeaux, member of that family of friends who had so efficiently supported La Bruyere's candidature to the French Academy only six years before. I do not think this fact has been noted, but surely it is almost certain that in their talks about literature Phelippeaux must have described La Bruyere to Addison? Another contributor to the _Spectator_, Eustace Budgell, translated Theophrastus and knew La Bruyere's book. Dr. Johnson mentions that the French moralist is the source of Addison's effort, but English critical opinion then, and since, has held that La Bruyere wrote without any of the earnestness of the moral reformer. I have indicated, I hope, the hasty error contained in such a judgment.