stress on our glorious past. At the same moment, therefore,
when I placed before the eyes of the French public the history and
original monuments of the institutions and revolutions of England, I
entered with ardour into the study and exposition of the early state of
French society, its origin, laws, and different gradations of
development. I was equally desirous to give to my readers information on
a great foreign history, and to revive amongst them a taste and
inclination for the study of our own.

My labours were certainly in accord with the instincts and requirements
of the time; for they were received and seconded by the general movement
which then manifested itself in the public mind, and with reference to
the Government so much a subject of dispute. It is the happy tendency of
the French temperament to change the direction of its course without
slackening speed. It is singularly flexible, elastic, and prolific. An
obstacle impedes it, it opens another path; if burdened by fetters, it
still walks on while bearing them; if restrained on a given point, it
leaves it, and rebounds elsewhere. The Government of the right-hand
party restrained political life and action within a narrow circle, and
rendered them more difficult; the generation which was then beginning to
stir in the world, sought, not entirely independent of, but side by side
with politics, the employment of its strength and the gratification of
its desires: literature, philosophy, history, policy, and criticism
assumed a new and powerful flight. While a natural and unfortunate
reaction brought back into the field of combat the eighteenth century
with its old weapons, the nineteenth displayed itself with its original
ideas, tendencies, and features.

I do not quote particular names; those which deserve to be remembered
require no repetition; it is the general character of the intellectual
movement of the period that I wish to bring into light. This movement
was neither exclusively nor directly applied to politics, yet it was
from politics that it emanated; it was both literary and philosophic:
the human mind, disengaging itself from the interests and disputes of
the day, pressed forward through every path that presented itself, in
the search and enjoyment of the true and beautiful; but the first
impulse came from political liberty, and the hope of contributing to the
establishment of a free system was plainly perceptible in the most
abstract labours as in