earth and sky.

In old times, when one posted from Calais to Paris, there was about
half an hour's trot on the level, from the gate of Calais to the long
chalk hill, which had to be climbed before arriving at the first
post-house in the village of Marquise.

That chalk rise, virtually, is the front of France; that last bit of
level north of it, virtually the last of Flanders; south of it,
stretches now a district of chalk and fine building limestone,--(if you
keep your eyes open, you may see a great quarry of it on the west of the
railway, half-way between Calais and Boulogne, where once was a blessed
little craggy dingle opening into velvet lawns;)--this high, but never
mountainous, calcareous tract, sweeping round the chalk basin of Paris
away to Caen on one side, and Nancy on the other, and south as far as
Bourges, and the Limousin. This limestone tract, with its keen fresh
air, everywhere arable surface, and quarriable banks above well-watered
meadow, is the real country of the French. Here only are their arts
clearly developed. Farther south they are Gascons, or Limousins, or
Auvergnats, or the like. Westward, grim-granitic Bretons; eastward,
Alpine-bearish Burgundians: here only, on the chalk and finely-knit
marble, between, say, Amiens and Chartres one way, and between Caen and
Rheims on the other, have you real _France_.

Of which, before we carry on the farther vital history, I must ask the
reader to consider with me, a little, how history, so called, has been
for the most part written, and of what particulars it usually
consists.

Suppose that the tale of King Lear were a true one; and that a modern
historian were giving the abstract of it in a school manual,
purporting to contain all essential facts in British history valuable
to British youth in competitive examination. The story would be
related somewhat after this manner:--

"The reign of the last king of the seventy-ninth dynasty closed in a
series of events with the record of which it is painful to pollute the
pages of history. The weak old man wished to divide his kingdom into
dowries for his three daughters; but on proposing this arrangement to
them, finding it received by the youngest with coldness and reserve,
he drove her from his court, and divided the kingdom between his two
elder children.

"The youngest found refuge at the court of France, where ultimately
the prince royal married her. But the two elder daughters, having
obtained absol