It may be said generally that in this work Taine allows himself to be guided chiefly by an accurate study of facts. He plods with incredible patience through archives and libraries, deeds, reports, correspondences, and memoirs. His work is strong, solid, and trustworthy, so far as the term is applicable in speaking of historical research, because it is eminently conscientious and founded on wellauthenticated contemporary records. As soon as we open the first volume (Pre-revolutionary France, or L'ancien régime) we observe at the first glance what a difference lies between the manner in which Taine regards and handles these themes, and the way in which they have been treated by Carlyle, Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc, Michelet, and others. The most striking circumstance is that Taine has no political sympathies or antipathies whatever. Facts are more important to him than theories. Instead of attaching himself to a party, his chief concern is to fathom the causes of events, to inquire into their connection with other events, and to reveal the results arising out of them.

A. de Tocqueville in his valuable work L'ancien régime et la Révolution has treated the very same subject as Taine. But there is no kind of similarity between the methods of treatment followed by the two authors, although both occasionally arrive at the same conclusions. Taine cannot be denied the merit of being more original than most other modern authors. His style here is as brilliant and pithy as in any of his works. Tocqueville's dry facts become in his hands living and real. In the arrangement of his material Taine is immeasurably superior to his famous predecessor, whom, however, he highly esteems and frequently quotes. In contradistinction to Tocqueville, Taine divides his subject-matter into compact, well marked-off sections, thus securing an exactitude and clearness which afford great help to the reader. On the other hand, he is inferior to Tocqueville in the point of discretion in the choice of citations and in loftiness of reflection. He often loses freedom of vision in his attention to detail, and thus fails to command a large horizon and large fields of view. He forgets Michelet's warning that the microscope may become a snare to the writer of history-It is only too easy to mistake low mosses and fungi for high woods, or insects for giants.'

The author of the Origines de la France contemporaine has his own Ariadne clue through the labyrinth of controversy on the question of the great Revolution. He holds that no nation can attain to a stable form of government if it entirely detaches itself from the past, neglects the problem set before it by history, founds a constitution upon theories, and in its experiments treats men as if they were the pawns on a chess-board. He says that modern France, instead of being governed according to its natural requirements, has constantly been supplied with alien and artificial constitutions. The coat is VOL. XX.-No. 113.

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not fitted to the man, but the man must accommodate himself to the coat.' Naturally the man is uneasy under these circumstances. Abbé Sieyes said he would undertake to draw up a constitution without knowing anything of the country beforehand, and Rousseau's Contrat Social bears witness to a thorough ignorance of history and its lessons. Taine cannot reconcile himself to such constitutionmongers,' and insists that the framing of a constitution must be preceded by an intimate familiarity with the character of the people for whom it is designed. For this purpose the study of the past is indispensable.

/ In the first section of the Origines Taine introduces us to French society, as it was immediately before 1789. He shows that the edifice of the State, which had been maintained at such enormous expense, was so shaken to the very foundation that it could not but fall. The representative of the pre-revolutionary régime was the absolute monarch surrounded by a privileged class. One half of this class belonged to the ecclesiastical order. The manner in which the latter came into possession of its privileges is set forth with lucidity. At a time when society in France was disintegrated and brute force prevailed, Christian priests taught their religion and founded the Church. They terrified barbarous warriors with vividly drawn pictures of future torments, and threatened with the horrors of hell all who refused obedience to the Divine commands, while the faithful were to be rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven. Other priests cultivated the ground, and taught the people improved modes of agriculture. The monks showed a perseverance and industry which could not fail to bring success, and which gave them an actual superiority over others. It was only natural that the priests who won rich harvests from the soil and the priests who were the spiritual guides of the leaders in war, should soon become powerful, honoured, and wealthy. They deserved the position which they had gained, for they were benefactors to the people; their successors, however, the inheritors of their brilliant position in society, became unworthy of it, but unfortunately without forfeiting it. The same holds good of the other half of the privileged class the nobles. They also began by being benefactors of a people deficient in natural leaders. A man, stronger than the rest, built himself a castle and enforced peace and quiet in the territory which he was pleased to call his own. Peasant and merchant found protection from robbers under the shadow of the castle walls; the lord levied a tax upon them for his own subsistence, but they paid it willingly, coming off cheaper after all than if they had been plundered, and being secure of protection besides. This was the origin of feudal rights, which the feudal lords transmitted to their descendants. In the same manner in which the nobility acquired lordship over small districts, the power of a king developed till he became lord over all France. He again exercised the right of the stronger, till in

course of time he was acknowledged to be absolute master of the nobility and the peasant class. His claim was enforced by the declarations of the medieval doctors of law that the king was the only representative of the nation, and by those of the theologians that he was consecrated and crowned by the grace of God.' Taine paints in glowing colours the privileged classes in the days of their glory; the time when the feudal lords ceased to be men of the people and became courtiers after a long struggle against the tyranny of the crown; the time when they enjoyed all their hereditary privileges without rendering the former counter-services to their vassals, when they even forsook their feudal castles and crowded to Versailles to swell the train of the monarch.

Taine judges and illustrates the spirit of the eighteenth century in a masterly manner; he develops clearly and criticises ably the theories of Rousseau and Voltaire. The most remarkable chapters are those on the condition of the people towards the close of the ancien régime; this portion of the book is at once the saddest and the most interestingly written. Weighed down by taxation, in danger of imprisonment for every slight offence, aying of hunger in consequence of bad harvests, Taine calculates that from 1672 to 1715 about one-third of the poor people died of hunger; the tiers état' had no other consolation than the very dubious one that all would be better if only the truth could reach the king's ears.' The peasants led a life not a whit removed from that of the lower animals. It is, therefore, no wonder that they behaved like wild beasts when their turn of power came; that they held the 'rights of man' to be identical with the right to murder and to rob, and brought back the savage condition of the fourth century.

The first section shows us, then, how and from what causes the Revolution originated; it was inevitable, and inevitable also was its violence and fury. In ten years revenge was taken for thirteen centuries of sufferings, humiliations, and nameless cruelties.'

The delineation of this violence and rage of the Revolution forms the subject of the three volumes of the second section. From a purely literary point of view this differs considerably from the first. Whereas L'ancien régime contains many artistic brilliant descriptions of the Salon life, of the Court, of the so-called French classicism,' of the customs of the time, &c., which, apart from the psychological and historical interest of the book, afford most interesting and stimulating reading, all this is absent in La Révolution; this section is veritably dry--i.e. purely scientific and analytical; bare facts are recorded in it and knit together by philosophico-psychological comments strictly pertinent to the subject in hand. We do not miss the long spun-out metaphors and the like which stamp Taine's literary style with so unique a character; but not much actual description is to be found; on the contrary, the author often oppresses us with

the weight of his evidence; the excessive multiplication of minute details-however valuable they may be for his purpose-becomes wearisome at last. His study of original sources is here more thorough, more careful, and more comprehensive than ever. His judgments betoken such practical wisdom and sound common sense as is rarely found in abstract thinkers like Taine-more especially in those who, like Taine, have never taken an active share in politics.

It is almost impossible for one who has not lived in France, and does not know what an enthusiastic veneration most Frenchmenabove all most French writers-cherish for the Revolution of 1789, to realise what courage it requires to raise one's voice against it; and this is what Taine does. He dares to confess that he has arrived at the same conclusions as Burke; he dares, through many stout volumes, to give in his adhesion to Burke's views on the great Revolution; he dares to pronounce Burke's Reflections, which Michelet called a 'miserable piece of declamation,'' a masterpiece and a prophecy.' What daring! Who could have expected it from an author avowedly liberal, equally denounced by the reactionary party and the clericals? Only one who has kept himself immaculate, who enjoys such a reputation for political impartiality, scientific accuracy, and literary conscientiousness, only one who stands so absolutely independent as a man, a thinker, and an investigator as Taine does, can venture to permit himself such heresy without incurring grave suspicions on the part of liberally minded people. He is certainly no Le Maistre, but a man of the modern type, with a leaning to positivism, an open enemy of positive religions.

And this man (remarks Karl Hillebrand) declares the great Revolution to be a group of historical facts, in which evil passions, senseless notions, and purposeless actions far outweigh noble-mindedness, depth, and common sense. If up to this time modern men blamed the Revolution, it was only the Convention, whose terrorism and enactments they painted in dark colours, in order to place the year 1789 and the Constituent Assembly in a favourable light. But now Taine comes forward, throws to the winds all that thousands before him, and side by side with him, have maintained, and says, 'I determined to institute my own researches, instead of consulting historians; I determined to obtain my information from unprejudiced eye-witnesses, and I have come to the conviction that the chief calamity dates not from 1792 but from 1789.'

The results of his investigations are expressed more clearly in the following passage :—

During the three years subsequent to the storming of the Bastille, France offers us a singular spectacle; in the speeches of orators reign the purest humanity, in the laws the fairest symmetry, but in deeds the most savage roughness, in affairs the direst confusion. Surveyed from a distance this system seems to be the triumph of philosophy; closely inspected, it unmasks itself as a Carlovingian anarchy.

He speaks of the street mob giving itself the airs of the 'sovereign nation' with a contempt and in language which unconsciously remind

us of Shakespeare's Coriolanus.' He compares 'le peuple-roi' and its rule with Milton's hell-monsters :

Black it stood as night,

Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,

And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head,

The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

In short, he shatters the ideal of his compatriots in the most cruel and reckless fashion, and does not leave the Revolution a leg to stand on.

That Taine, despite his well-known antecedents, could come to such conclusions, can only be explained by what we may call his boundless impartiality. He is so free from bias, and forgets himself so completely in the handling of his subject, that many a reader, taking up La Révolution, without any previous acquaintance with his method and his earlier writings, would take him for a Conservative; while there are some passages which, severed from the context, might mislead a superficial reader of reviews into the supposition that he was even a reactionary. In truth there can be no question here of tendency in one direction or another. Taine is, as he always has been, without political bias, but he is sufficiently free from prejudice to desire a good government for his country; and as his investigations have convinced him-not in accordance with his inclinations, but in defiance of them-that France was ill governed under the Revolution, he makes no secret of his conviction. He quite sees how desirable it was that the miserable state of things under the ancien régime should be improved to the advantage of the people, but he fails to see this desirable improvement in the changes introduced in 1789; he even considers that they made things worse. He looks upon the contrat social as a very beautiful ideal, but sees the impossibility of its being carried out in practical life, so long as men remain what they always have been and still are. He proves himself through the whole course of his attack upon the constitution of 1791 to be thoroughly acquainted with human nature. To say that Taine wrote against the Revolution in order to ensure his election to the Academy-as was suggested by his recently deceased 'friend' and schoolfellow, Aboutis nonsense. Taine's impartiality and love of truth are evident and indubitable to everyone who is familiar with his literary character on one side, and on the other with the later literature of the Revolution. The truth lies in the following words of Taine: 'J'ai tracé le portrait [of revolutionary France] sans me préoccuper de mes débats présents; j'ai écrit comme si j'avais eu pour sujet les révolutions de Florence ou d'Athènes. Ceci est de l'histoire, rien de plus.' This may probably prove unsatisfactory to some one-sided French Chauvinists. But the unbiassed foreigner-however radical his tendencies-is not obliged to take umbrage at it, and he must be allowed to rejoice that there are historians who deal with their subject as the anatomist with his,