Certain modern historians have successfully accomplished this task. The author, unable to follow them, and compelled to present his readers with a simple and unassuming chronicle, feels bound to express his admiration for those who have thus been able to revive the buried past. He firmly believes that, if a history should have truth, it should also have life. The events of past times did not resemble, in the days when they occurred, those grand museums of Rome, Naples, Paris, and London, in whose galleries we behold long rows of marble statues, mummies, and tombs. There were then living beings who thought, felt, spoke, acted, and struggled. The picture, whatever history may be able to do, will always have less of life than the reality. When an historian comes across a speech of one of the actors in the great drama of human affairs, he ought to lay hold of it, as if it were a pearl, and weave it into his tapestry, in order to relieve the duller colours and give more solidity and brilliancy. Whether the speech be met with in the letters or writings of the actor himself, or in those of the chroniclers, is a matter of no importance: he should take it wherever he finds it. The history which exhibits men thinking, feeling, and acting as they did in their lifetime, is of far higher value than those purely intellectual compositions in which the actors are deprived of speech and even of life. The author, having given his opinion in favour of this better and higher historical method, is compelled to express a regret: Le _précepte_ est aisé, mais l’art est difficile. And as he looks at his work, he has to repeat with sorrow the confession of the poet of antiquity: _Deteriora sequor!_ This work is not a biography of Calvin, as some may imagine. The name of that great reformer appears, indeed, on the title-page, and we shall feel a pleasure, whenever the opportunity occurs, in endeavouring to restore the true colours to that figure so strangely misunderstood in our days. We know that, in so doing, we shall shock certain deeply-rooted prejudices, and shall offend those who accept without examination, in this respect, the fables of Romish writers. Tacitus indeed assures us that malignity has a false show of liberty: _Malignitati falsa species libertatis inest_; that history is listened to with more favour when she slanders and disparages: _Obtrectatio et livor pronis auribus accipiuntur_. But what historian could entertain the culpable ambition of pleasing at the expense of truth? Moreover, we believe that, if our age still labours under great errors with respect to many men and things, it is more competent than those which went before to hear the truth, to examine, appreciate, and accept it.