description of social species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in view of the two sexes.  Then, among animals the drama is limited; there is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other—­that is all.  Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or less intelligence makes the struggle far more complicated.  Though some savants do not yet admit that the animal nature flows into human nature through an immense tide of life, the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and the noble sometimes sinks to the lowest social grade.  Again, Buffon found that life was extremely simple among animals.  Animals have little property, and neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his life in everything he appropriates to his use.  Though Leuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller and other patient investigators have shown us how interesting are the habits of animals, those of each kind, are, at least to our eyes, always and in every age alike; whereas the dress, the manners, the speech, the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of civilization.

Hence the work to be written needed a threefold form—­men, women, and things; that is to say, persons and the material expression of their minds; man, in short, and life.

As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called History, who can have failed to note that the writers of all periods, in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten to give us a history of manners?  The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans excites rather than satisfies our curiosity.  It was from observing this great void in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy devoted his life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in Le Jeune Anacharsis.

But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which society offers, be made interesting?  How, at the same time, please the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and philosophy under striking imagery?  Though I could conceive of the importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers had spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in depicting one aspect of life.  It was with this idea that I read the works of Walter Scott.  Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, or finder (trouvere=trouveur), had just then given an aspect of grandeur to a class of composition unjustly regarded as of the second rank.  Is it not really more difficult to compete with personal and parochial interests by writing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil Blas, Ossian, Julie d’Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie