The latter work was published as long ago as 1845. Why, then, was the drama kept back? The reason is a curious one. Perhaps in foraging so extensively among the records of the twelfth century, De Rémusat had become impressed with the mediæval motto, “Beware the man of one book.” He was afraid, so his son assures us, to risk his reputation with the public as a statesman and a man of affairs, by appearing before it as the writer of a drama, even a “philosophical” one, on a subject notoriously romantic. “Il faut bien dire,” says M. Paul De Rémusat, “que la première raison de mon père pour refuser de publier le drame d’Abélard, c’était la pensée que, dans notre pays, les hommes sont d’avance et dès leur début, et qu’il ne voulait point sortir de la situation littéraire et politique où il s’était d’abord placé. Il avait vu trop souvent la défiance accuellir une œuvre nouvelle et étrangère aux premiers essais d’un écrivain. L’idée d’un homme universel, ou seulement doué de talents variés, est rarement acceptée, et ce qu’on gagne en étendu paraît presque toujours perdu en profondeur. L’example de Voltaire, qui était si longtemps discuté et contesté, est plus effrayant pour les audacieux que rassurant pour les timides. Mon père n’espérait pas que l’on fit en sa faveur une exception à la loi commune de la spécialité de l’esprit. Il lui semblait qu’il n’eût acquit en littérature quelque réputation qu’au dépens de son autorité politique.” These scruples, at least in the case of De Rémusat, seem excessive. The French _bourgeoisie_ have never had that rooted antipathy to men of genius which is characteristic of the middle class in England; and it certainly would not have taken the better part of fifty years to convince them that the author of _Vivian Grey_ had in him the stuff of a practical and hard-headed statesman. Moreover, a philosophical drama, by the very sobriety of its title, protects its author against the charge of excessive literary levity. Finally, the political career of the author of _Abélard_, though not devoid of distinction, was hardly of that commanding sort which might console some men, at its close, for the sacrifice of more congenial tastes and more enduring fame. He became Minister of the Interior, for a brief period, in Thiers’ Cabinet of 1840, and after the Revolution of 1848 he remained a member of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. But the _Coup d’état_ practically put an end to his political prospects. It is true he reappeared, for a short interval, as the _fides Achates_ of Thiers during that statesman’s brief tenure of power after the Franco-German War. But he was too advanced in years, and too completely overshadowed by his conspicuous friend, who concentrated all business and all distinction in his own person, to add anything to his former reputation as a politician. His son observes that, in withholding the publication of his drama upon Abélard, he perhaps remembered one of the most