Note 533 — XI. OF MANKIND.

The author adds in a note: “This is not so much a portrait of one individual, as a collection of anecdotes of absent-minded persons. If they please, there cannot be too large a number of them, for as tastes differ, my readers can pick and choose.” The chief traits of Menalcas are based on stories related by the Count de Brancas, who died eleven years before the above paragraph first saw the light (1691); others are said to have happened to the Prince de la Roche-sur-Yon, afterwards Prince de Conti (1664-1709), and to a certain Abbé de Mauroy, chaplain to Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Eustace Budgell (1685-1736) depicts in No. 77 of the “Spectator” “an absent man,” and also speaks of Monsieur Bruyère, who “has given us the character of an absent man with a great deal of humour;” and then prints “the heads” of Menalcasʼ portrait. According to Wattʼs Bibliotheca Britannica, Budgell was the author of a translation of La Bruyèreʼs “Characters,” published 1699 and 1702; but in the edition of 1702 there is on the title-page, “made English by several hands.”