[Footnote 233: Léonce de Lavergne, "Economie rurale en Angleterre," passim.] [Footnote 234: De Foe was of the same opinion, and pretended that economy was not an English virtue, and that an Englishman can hardly live with twenty shillings a week, while a Dutchman with the same money becomes wealthy, and leaves his children very well off. An English laborer lives poor and wretchedly with nine shillings a week, whilst a Dutchman lives very comfortably with the same wages.] [Footnote 235: In familiar language, the father is called in England the "governor"; in France "le banquier."] [Footnote 236: Let the reader, amongst many others, peruse the sermons of Dr. Arnold, delivered in the school chapel at Rugby.] [Footnote 237: "The Wide, Wide World," by Elizabeth Wetherell (an American book). See also the novels of Miss Yonge, and chiefly those of George Eliot.] BOOK V--MODERN AUTHORS INTRODUCTORY NOTE The translator thinks it due to M. Taine to state that the fifth book, on the Modern Authors, was written whilst Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, and Mill were still alive. He also gives the original preface of that book: "This fifth book is the complement to the 'History of English Literature'; it is written on another plan, because the subject is different. The present period is not yet completed, and the ideas which govern it are in process of formation, that is, in the rough. We cannot therefore as yet systematically arrange them. When documents are still mere indications, history is necessarily reduced to 'studies'; knowledge is moulded from life; and our conclusions cannot be other than incomplete, so long as the facts which suggest them are unfinished. Fifty years hence the history of this age may be written; in the meantime we can but sketch it. I have selected from contemporary English writers the most original minds, the most consistent, and the most contrasted; they may be regarded as specimens, representing the common features, the opposing tendencies, and consequently the general direction of the public mind.