wn to the death of Lewis the Fourteenth, had prepared the
distractions of the monarchy under Lewis's descendants.

Full of interest as it is, M. Taine's book can hardly be described
as containing much that is new or strikingly significant. He
develops one idea, indeed, which we have never before seen stated in
its present form, but which, if it implies more than has been often
advanced by previous writers in other forms, cannot be accepted as
true. This is perhaps a point better worth discussing than any other
which his book raises. The rest is a very elaborate and thorough
description of the structure of society, of its physiognomy in
manners and characteristics, the privileges, the burdens, the daily
walk and conversation of the various classes which made up the
French people between the Regency and the Revolution. M. Taine's
method of description does not strike one as altogether happy. It is
a common complaint against French historians that they are too lax
about their authorities, and too heedless about giving us chapter
and verse for their assertions. M. Taine goes to the contrary
extreme, and pours his note-books into his text with a steady-handed
profusion that is excessively fatiguing, and makes the result far
less effective than it would have been if all this industrious
reading had been thoroughly fused and recast into a homogeneous
whole. It is an ungenerous trick of criticism to disparage good work
by comparing it with better; but the reader can scarcely help
contrasting M. Taine's overcrowded pages with the perfect
assimilation, the pithy fulness, the pregnant meditation, of De
Tocqueville's book on the same subject. When we attempt to reduce M.
Taine's chapters to a body of propositions standing out in definite
relief from one another, yet conveying a certain unity of
interpretation, we soon feel how possible it is for an author to
have literary clearness along with historic obscurity.

In another respect we are inclined to question the felicity of M.
Taine's method. It does not convey the impression of movement. The
steps and changes in the conflict among the organs of the old
society are not marked in their order and succession. The reader is
not kept alive to the gradual progress of the break-up of old
institutions and ideas. The sense of an active and ceaseless
struggle, extending in various stages across the century, is effaced
by an exclusive attention to the social details of a given phase. We
n