George Saintsbury.(1)

London, October 1892.

1 As I have spoken so strongly of the attempts to identify the personages of the Heptameron, it might seem discourteous not to mention that one of the most enthusiastic and erudite English students of Margaret, Madame Darmesteter (Miss Mary Robinson), appears to be convinced of the possibility and advisableness of discovering these originals.  Everything that this lady writes is most agreeable to read; but I fear I cannot say that her arguments have converted me.—­G.  S.

DEDICATIONS AND PREFACE,

PREFIXED TO THE FIRST TWO EDITIONS OF THE TALES OF THE QUEEN OF NAVARRE.

To the most Illustrious, most Humble, and most Excellent Princess,

Madame Margaret de Bourbon,

Duchess of Nevers, Marchioness of Illes, Countess of Eu, of Dreux, Retelois, Columbiers, and Beaufort, Lady of Aspremont, of Cham-Regnault, of Arches, Rencaurt, Monrond, and La Chapelle-d’Angylon, Peter Boaistuau surnamed Launay, offers most humble salutation and perpetual obedience.(1)

1 This dedicatory preface appeared in the first edition of Queen Margaret’s Tales, published by Boaistuau in 1558 under the title of Histoires des Amans Fortunez.  The Princess addressed was the daughter of Charles, Duke of Vendome; she was wedded in 1538 to Francis of Cleves, Duke of Nevers, and by this marriage became niece to the Queen of Navarre.—­Ed.

Madam, That great oracle of God, St. John Chrysostom, deplores with infinite compassion in some part of his works the disaster and calamity of his century, in which not only was the memory of an infinity of illustrious persons cut off from among mankind, but, what is more, their writings, by which the rich conceptions of their souls and the divine ornaments of their minds were to have been consecrated to posterity, did not survive them.  And certainly with most manifest reason did this good and holy man address such a complaint to the whole Christian Republic, touched as he was with just grief for an infinity of thousands of books, of which some have been lost and buried in eternal forgetfulness by the negligence of men, others dispersed and destroyed by the cruel incursions of war, others rotted and spoiled as much by the rigour of time as by carelessness to collect and preserve them; whereof the ancient Histories and Annals furnish a sufficient example in the memorable library of that great King of Egypt, Ptolemy Phila-delphus, which had been formed with the sweat and blood of so many notable philosophers, and maintained, ordered, and preserved by the liberality of that great monarch.  And yet in less than a day, by the monstrous and abominable cruelty of the soldiers of Caesar, when the latter followed Pompey to Alexandria, it was burned and reduced to ashes.  Zonarius, the ecclesiastical historian, writes that the same happened at Constantinople in the time of