It is not only in Napoleonic memoirs that the French are so fortunate.  The almost equally interesting age of Louis XIV. produced an even more wonderful series.  If you go deeply into the subject you are amazed by their number, and you feel as if every one at the Court of the Roi Soleil had done what he (or she) could to give away their neighbours.  Just to take the more obvious, there are St. Simon’s Memoirs—­those in themselves give us a more comprehensive and intimate view of the age than anything I know of which treats of the times of Queen Victoria.  Then there is St. Evremond, who is nearly as complete.  Do you want the view of a woman of quality?  There are the letters of Madame de Sevigne (eight volumes of them), perhaps the most wonderful series of letters that any woman has ever penned.  Do you want the confessions of a rake of the period?  Here are the too salacious memoirs of the mischievous Duc de Roquelaure, not reading for the nursery certainly, not even for the boudoir, but a strange and very intimate picture of the times.  All these books fit into each other, for the characters of the one reappear in the others.  You come to know them quite familiarly before you have finished, their loves and their hates, their duels, their intrigues, and their ultimate fortunes.  If you do not care to go so deeply into it you have only to put Julia Pardoe’s four-volumed “Court of Louis XIV.” upon your shelf, and you will find a very admirable condensation—­or a distillation rather, for most of the salt is left behind.  There is another book too—­that big one on the bottom shelf—­which holds it all between its brown and gold covers.  An extravagance that—­for it cost me some sovereigns—­but it is something to have the portraits of all that wonderful galaxy, of Louis, of the devout Maintenon, of the frail Montespan, of Bossuet, Fenelon, Moliere, Racine, Pascal, Conde, Turenne, and all the saints and sinners of the age.  If you want to make yourself a present, and chance upon a copy of “The Court and Times of Louis XIV.,” you will never think that your money has been wasted.

Well, I have bored you unduly, my patient friend, with my love of memoirs, Napoleonic and otherwise, which give a touch of human interest to the arid records of history.  Not that history should be arid.  It ought to be the most interesting subject upon earth, the story of ourselves, of our forefathers, of the human race, the events which made us what we are, and wherein, if Weismann’s views hold the field, some microscopic fraction of this very body which for the instant we chance to inhabit may have borne a part.  But unfortunately the power of accumulating knowledge and that of imparting it are two very different things, and the uninspired historian becomes merely the dignified compiler of an enlarged almanac.  Worst of all, when a man does come along with fancy and imagination, who can breathe the breath of life into the dry bones, it is the fashion for the dryasdusts