emporary oblivion; for in
many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
value and interest were not sooner produced.

The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
of A. Moreau de Jonnes, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Leon
Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
competition with literature of this class.

'Times are changed,' observes M. Leon Say in his preface. 'The taste
of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of