When Mr. Wells goes on to the climax of the affair abroad, which is the French Revolution, his work becomes a mixture of good and bad. The précis side of it is good in so far as it proceeds from his own pen. It is, in my judgment, an error to print great wads of Carlyle, column after column. Mr. Wells’s own less picturesque way of writing is much better suited for an outline—but that is a small point. The sequence of events and their proportion is well kept, and there is a very good little sketch map of the Campaign of Valmy which shows that the author—or whoever else it was that drew the map—has got a good clear comprehension of that rather complicated and very important episode. But in his attempts to judge the characters of the Revolution he goes all wrong, because he is dealing with a whole side of Europe which is unfamiliar to him. For instance, he does not know what the trouble was with Marie Antoinette. It was not that she was grossly extravagant; that is a mere legend. She was a lady; and certainly Mr. Wells would not give one to understand that; moreover, during all the later part of her life she had become a very sincerely religious woman, practising, frequenting the Sacraments. The tragedy of the queen lay in the intimate relations of her early married life. Now, everybody ought to know that who pretends to deal with the period at all. The details have been fully printed (by myself among others) and are available to popular writers. In the same way he has got Robespierre all wrong. He has evidently read nothing modern on Robespierre, and he commits the old error of recording the last and worst of the Terror as being in particular Robespierre’s work. The point is of no very great importance, but it is worth quoting because it is very characteristic. Ask one of Mr. Wells’s myriad-headed popular public, who Robespierre was, and they would answer a fanatical Republican who attempted to force his views upon France by guillotine, and was at last put down because people sickened of the increasing slaughter. Now when a popular author writes what his very large and uninstructed public already believe they know, he naturally goes down; if he wrote historical truth instead, his work would be less pleasant to them and far less saleable. Yet, after all, truth is the test of good history; not momentary selling value.