mething only less absurd than the Russian revolution
of the other day, though fortunately less disastrous;[331] of
bureaucracy of the corrupt and shabby character which seemed to cling
to the whole _regime_; and of remarkable vying between two distinguished
men of letters, Guizot and Thiers, as to which should do most to confirm
the saying of the wicked that men of letters had much better have
nothing to do with politics.[332] Abroad (with the exception of the
acquisition of Algeria, which had begun earlier, and which conferred no
great honour, though some profit, and a little snatching up of a few
loose trifles such as the Society Islands, which we had, according to
our custom, carelessly or benevolently left to gleaners), French arms,
despite a great deal of brag and swagger, obtained little glory, while
French diplomacy let itself wallow in one of the foulest sloughs in
history, the matter of the Spanish marriages.

[Sidenote: And almost a literary zenith.]

But this unsatisfactory state of things was made up--and more than made
up--for posterity if not for contemporaries--by the extraordinary
development of literature and the arts--especially literature and most
especially of all the _belles-lettres_. If (which would be rather
impossible) one were to evaluate the relative excellence of poetry and
of prose fiction in the time itself, a great deal could be said on both
sides. But if one took the larger historic view, it would certainly have
to be admitted that, while the excellence of French poetry was a
magnificent Renaissance after a long period of something like sterility,
the excellence of the novel was something more--an achievement of things
never yet achieved; an acquisition and settlement of territory which had
never previously been even explored.

I venture to hope that no great injustice has been done to the previous
accomplishments of France in this department as they were surveyed in
the last volume. She had been, if not the inventress of Romance, the
[Greek: aidoie tamie]--the revered distributress--of it to all nations;
she had made the short story her own to such an extent that, in almost
all its forms, she had reached and kept mastery of it; and in various
isolated instances she had done very important, if not now universally
acceptable, work in the practice of the "Heroic." With Rabelais, Lesage,
almost Marivaux, certainly, in his one diploma-piece, Prevost, she had
contributed persons and things of