als the drama is limited; there
is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other--that is all.
Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or less intelligence makes
the struggle far more complicated. Though some savants do not yet admit
that the animal nature flows into human nature through an immense tide
of life, the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and the noble sometimes
sinks to the lowest social grade. Again, Buffon found that life was
extremely simple among animals. Animals have little property, and
neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be
sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his
life in everything he appropriates to his use. Though Leuwenhoek,
Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller and
other patient investigators have shown us how interesting are the habits
of animals, those of each kind, are, at least to our eyes, always and
in every age alike; whereas the dress, the manners, the speech, the
dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and
a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of
civilization.

Hence the work to be written needed a threefold form--men, women, and
things; that is to say, persons and the material expression of their
minds; man, in short, and life.

As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called History,
who can have failed to note that the writers of all periods, in Egypt,
Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten to give us a history of
manners? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans
excites rather than satisfies our curiosity. It was from observing this
great void in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy devoted his
life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in _Le Jeune Anacharsis_.

But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which
society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time, please
the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and
philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the
importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I
saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers had
spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in depicting
one aspect of life. It was with this idea that I read the works
of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, or finder
(_trouvere=trouveur_), had just then g