declared that he could not allow the library
to be pulled about by an unknown man of letters. In the end, the usual
modest resources of a private collection satisfied his requirements.
But the vivid gleam, the mixture of the sublime with the grotesque,
make other opponents forget the impatient verdicts and the poverty of
settled fact in the volumes that delivered our fathers from thraldom
to Burke. They remain one of those disappointing stormclouds that
give out more thunder than lightning.

* * * * *

The proof of advancing knowledge is the improvement in compendiums and
school books. There are three which must be mentioned. In the middle
of the century Lavallee wrote a history of France for his students at
the Military College. Quoting Napoleon's remark, that the history of
France must be in four volumes or in a hundred, he pronounces in
favour of four. During a generation his work passed for the best of
its kind. Being at St. Cyr, once the famous girls' school, for which
Racine composed his later tragedies, he devoted many years to the
elucidation of Madame de Maintenon, and the recovery of her
interpolated letters. His Revolution is contained in 230 pages of his
fourth volume. There is an abridgment of the like moderate dimensions
by Carnot. He was the father of the President, and the son of the
organiser of victory, who, in 1815, gave the memorable advice to
Napoleon that, if he made a rush at the English, he would find them
scattered and unprepared. He was a militant republican, editor of the
_Memoirs_ of his father, of Gregoire, and of Barere, and M. Aulard
praises his book, with the sympathy of a co-religionist, as the best
existing narrative. Other good republicans prefer what Henri Martin
wrote in continuation of his history of France. I should have no
difficulty in declaring that the seventh volume of the French history
by Dareste is superior to them all; and however far we carry the
process of selection and exclusion, I would never surrender it.

We have seen that there are many able works on either side, and two or
three that are excellent. And there are a few sagacious and impartial
men who keep the narrow path between them: Tocqueville for the origin,
Droz and Laboulaye for the decisive period of 1789, Duvergier de
Hauranne for all the political thinking, Dareste for the great outline
of public events, in peace and war. They amount to no more than five
volumes, and are l