ess than the single Thiers or Michelet, and not half
as long as Louis Blanc. We can easily read them through; and we shall
find that they have made all things clear to us, that we can trust
them, and that we have nothing to unlearn. But if we confine ourselves
to the company of men who steer a judicious middle course, with whom
we find that we can agree, our wisdom will turn sour, and we shall
never behold parties in their strength. No man feels the grandeur of
the Revolution till he reads Michelet, or the horror of it without
reading Taine. But I have kept the best for the end, and will speak of
Taine, and two or three more who rival Taine, next week.

* * * * *

After much partial and contentious writing, sagacious men attained a
reasonable judgment on the good and evil, the truth and error, of the
Revolution. The view established by constitutional royalists, like
Duvergier de Hauranne, and by men equidistant from royalist or
republican exclusiveness, such as Tocqueville and Laboulaye, was very
largely shared by intelligent democrats, more particularly by Lanfrey,
and by Quinet in his two volumes on the genius of the Revolution. At
that time, under the Second Empire, there was nothing that could be
called an adequate history. The archives were practically unexplored,
and men had no idea of the amount of labour serious exploration
implies. The first writer who produced original matter from the papers
of the Paris Commune was Mortimer Ternaux, whose eight volumes on the
Reign of Terror came out between 1862 and 1880. What he revealed was
so decisive that it obliged Sybel to rewrite what he had written on
the scenes of September.

When I describe the real study of the Revolution as beginning with
Tocqueville and Ternaux, I mean the study of it in the genuine and
official sources. Memoirs, of course, abounded. There are more than a
hundred. But memoirs do not supply the certainty of history. Certainty
comes with the means of control, and there is no controlling or
testing memoirs without the contemporary document. Down to the middle
of the century, private letters and official documents were rare.
Then, in the early summer of 1851, two important collections appeared
within a few weeks of each other.

First came the _Memoirs_ of Mallet du Pan, a liberal, independent, and
discerning observer, whom, apart from the gift of style, Taine
compares to Burke, and who, like Burke, went over to the