[35] “We have wished to warn and not to bite; to be useful and not to wound; to benefit the morals of men, and not to be detrimental to them.” This quotation is taken from one of the letters of Erasmus to Martin Dorpius, in which the former replies to some criticisms on his “Praise of Folly.” The preface to the “Characters,” altered and augmented several times by the author himself, is found for the first time, in its present form, in the eighth edition of his work.
[36] The first edition of the “Characters,” published in 1688, contained 420 characters, the fourth edition 771.
[37] This mark, a ((¶)) between double parentheses, as well as the same mark between single parentheses, was first employed in the fifth edition (1690) of the “Characters,” and in all the following ones. But the mere ¶ without any parentheses was used by La Bruyère in all editions to denote the beginning of a paragraph.
[38] This refers to the sixth (1691), seventh (1692), and eighth (1694) editions. The fifth edition contained 923 characters, the sixth 997, the seventh 1073, and the eighth 1120. The ninth edition (1696) was published about a month after the death of La Bruyère.
[39] This seems to allude to La Rochefoucauldʼs “Maxims.”
[40] M. de La Bruyère adopts the chronology of Suidas, a Greek lexicographer who flourished during the latter end of the eleventh century; according to the Hebrew chronology the world had only existed 5692 years when the “Characters” were first published in 1688.
[41] Abile in the original, in the sense of the English word “able,” and used as a noun, was already then considered antiquated.
[42] Sentiment, in the original, was during the seventeenth century not seldom employed in French for “opinion,” as “sentiments” are at present in English.
[43] This magistrate is said to have been Pierre Poncet de la Rivière, Count dʼAblys (1600-1681), a barrister, a councillor of state, and member of the royal council of finances, whose absurd moral treatise, Considérations sur les avantages de la vieillesse dans la vie chrétienne, politique, civile, économique et solitaire, was published under the pseudonym of the Baron de Prelle, in the month of August 1677, about one month before the death of the Lord Chancellor dʼAligre, and more than three months before President Lamoignonʼs decease.
[44] At that time so-called collections of anecdotes, such as Boléana, Ménagiana, and Segraisiana, were greatly in vogue.