s every
constitutional discussion, aided by much confidential knowledge, and
the fullest acquaintance with pamphlets and leading articles. He is
not so much at home in books; but he does not allow a shade of
intelligent thought or a valid argument to escape him. During the
Restoration, the great controversy of all ages, the conflict between
reason and custom was fought out on the higher level. The question at
that time was not which of the two should prevail, but how they should
be reconciled, and whether rational thought and national life could be
made to harmonise. The introductory volume covers the Revolution, and
traces the progress and variation of views of government in France,
from the appearance of Sieyes to the elevation of Napoleon.

Laboulaye was a man of like calibre and measurements, whom
Waddington, when he was minister, called the true successor of
Tocqueville. Like him he had saturated himself with American ideas,
and like him he was persuaded that the revolutionary legacy of
concentrated power was the chief obstacle to free institutions. He
wrote, in three small volumes, a history of the United States, which
is a most intelligent abstract of what he had learnt in Bancroft and
Hildreth. He wrote with the utmost lucidity and definiteness, and
never darkened counsel with prevaricating eloquence, so that there is
no man from whom it is so easy and so agreeable to learn. His lectures
on the early days of the Revolution were published from time to time
in a review, and, I believe, have not been collected. Laboulaye was a
scholar as well as a statesman, and always knew his subject well, and
as a guide to the times we can have none more helpful than his
unfinished course.

* * * * *

The event of the English competition is the appearance of Carlyle.
After fifty years we are still dependent on him for Cromwell, and in
_Past and Present_ he gave what was the most remarkable piece of
historical thinking in the language. But the mystery of investigation
had not been revealed to him when he began his most famous book. He
was scared from the Museum by an offender who sneezed in the Reading
Room. As the French pamphlets were not yet catalogued, he asked
permission to examine them and to make his selection at the shelves on
which they stood. He complained that, having applied to a respectable
official, he had been refused. Panizzi, furious at being described as
a respectable official,