ation of the "Republic of Plato." She may safely be left to her
fate. The diaries of Gouverneur Morris were not in her course of
reading, and they seem almost to have been forgotten. I do not recommend
them to anybody. There are passages in them which might shock the
Prohibitionist, and also those persons who believe in divorce _[`a] la
mode de_ Madame de Sta[:e]l.

For me, they are not only constantly amusing, constantly instructive,
but they give the best pictures of Parisian interiors of the time before
and during the French Revolution. Because I am firmly convinced of this,
is it necessary that I should be expected to place them among the Best
One Hundred Books? To me they will be always among my best twenty-five
books.

In the first place Gouverneur Morris knew well how to serve his country
efficiently; and he was too sensible of the debt of that country to
France and too sympathetic with the essential genius of the French
people not to do his best to serve her, too. The original verses in his
memoirs are the worst things in the volumes; but then, everybody has the
faults of his virtues, and nearly everybody wrote verses at that time.
He was one of the wisest of all our diplomatists. He was broad minded,
cultivated, plastic within reasonable limits, and not corroded with a
venom of partisan politics. I repeat, with a polite anticipation of
contradiction, that no better picture has ever been given of the
aristocratic society of the late eighteenth century in Paris.

His gallantries are amusing; yet there is underneath his affectation of
the frivolous vice of the time, which might be euphemistically called
"exaggerated chivalry, a fundamental morality which one does not find in
that class of systematic _rou['e]s_" who were astonished at the virtue of
the ladies at Newport when the Count de Lauzun and his friends dwelt in
that town. There may be dull pages in these memoirs, but if so I have
not yet found them.

In "The Diary and Letters" there are many bits of gossip about certain
great persons, notably about Talleyrand, who got rid of his mitre as
soon as he could, and Madame de Flahaut. It seems to me that Talleyrand
and Philippe ['E]galit['e] were the most fascinating characters of the
French Revolution, for the same reason perhaps that moved a small boy
who was listening to a particularly dull history of the New Testament to
exclaim suddenly, "Oh, skip about the other apostles; read to me about
Judas!"

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