But, however great the value of his writings may be, a still greater value attaches to the character of the man himself, as it is displayed in these volumes.  M. de Beaumont’s brief and affectionate memoir of his friend, and Tocqueville’s own letters, are not so much narratives of events as evidences of character.  His life was, indeed, not marked with extraordinary incidents.  It was the life of a man whose career was limited both by his own temperament and by the public circumstances of his times; of one who set more value upon ideas than upon events; who sought intellectual satisfactions and distinctions rather than personal advancement; who affected his contemporaries by his thought and his integrity of principle more than by power of commanding position or energy of resolute will.  Although for many years in public life, he made little mark on public affairs.  But his influence, though indirect, was perhaps not the less strong or permanent.  The course of political affairs is in the long run greatly modified, if not completely guided, by the thinkers of a nation.  Tocqueville’s convictions kept him for the most part in opposition to the successive governments of France during the period of his public life.  But his reputation and the weight of his authority are continually increasing, and of the Frenchmen of the last generation few have done so much as he to extend by his writings the knowledge, and to strengthen by his example the love of those principles by which liberty is maintained and secured, and upon which the real advancement of society depends.  The leading facts of his life may be briefly told.

Born in 1805, at Paris, of an old and honorable family, his early years were passed at home.  As a youth, he was for some time at the college of Metz; but his education was irregular, and he was not distinguished for scholarship.  In 1826 and 1827 he travelled with one of his brothers in Italy and Sicily, and on his return to France was attached to the Court of Justice at Versailles, where his father, the Count de Tocqueville, was then Prefect, in the quality of Juge-Auditeur, an office to which there is none correspondent in our courts.  It was at this time that his friendship with M. Gustave de Beaumont began.

For more than two years he performed the duties of this place with marked fidelity and ability.  But at the same time he pursued studies less narrow and technical than the law, investigating with ardor the general questions of politics, and laying the foundation of those principles and opinions which he afterward developed in his writings and his public life.  He witnessed the Revolution of 1830 with regret, not because he was personally attached to the elder branch of the Bourbons, but because he dreaded the effect of a sudden and violent change of dynasty upon the stability of those constitutional institutions which were of too recent establishment to be firmly rooted in France, but to which he looked as the safeguard