n move naturally in the great city or in the provinces which he
has given them for their home. A devoted admirer however tells me that
in his opinion Balzac has created universal types; the counterpart of
some of his men may be seen in the business and social world of Boston,
and the peculiarly sharp and dishonest transaction which brought Cesar
Birotteau to financial ruin was here exactly reproduced.

The French language and literature seem to possess the merits which ours
lack; and the writer of history cannot afford to miss the lessons he
will receive by a constant reading of the best French prose.

I do not ask the Freshman who is going to be a historian to realize
Macaulay's ideal of a scholar, to "read Plato with his feet on the
fender,"[4] but he should at least acquire a pretty thorough knowledge
of classical Latin, so that he can read Latin, let me say, as many of us
read German, that is with the use of a lexicon and the occasional
translation of a sentence or a paragraph into English to arrive at its
exact meaning. Of this, I can speak from the point of view of one who is
deficient. The reading of Latin has been for me a grinding labor and I
would have liked to read with pleasure in the original, the History and
Annals of Tacitus, Caesar's Gallic and Civil wars and Cicero's Orations
and Private Letters even to the point of following Macaulay's advice,
"Soak your mind with Cicero."[4] These would have given me, I fancy, a
more vivid impression of two periods of Roman history than I now
possess. Ferrero, who is imparting a fresh interest to the last period
of the Roman republic, owes a part of his success, I think, to his
thorough digestion and effective use of Cicero's letters, which have the
faculty of making one acquainted with Cicero just as if he were a modern
man. During a sojourn on the shores of Lake Geneva, I read two volumes
of Voltaire's private correspondence, and later, while passing the
winter in Rome, the four volumes of Cicero's letters in French. I could
not help thinking that in the republic of letters one was not in time at
a far greater distance from Cicero than from Voltaire. While the
impression of nearness may have come from reading both series of letters
in French, or because, to use John Morley's words, "two of the most
perfect masters of the art of letter writing were Cicero and
Voltaire,"[5] there is a decided flavor of the nineteenth century in
Cicero's words to a good liver whom he i