Lamartine once said that the Revolution has mysteries but no enigmas. It is humiliating to be obliged to confess that those words are no nearer truth now than when they were written. People have not yet ceased to dispute about the real origin and nature of the event. It was the deficit; it was the famine; it was the Austrian Committee; it was the Diamond Necklace, and the humiliating memories of the Seven Years' War; it was the pride of nobles or the intolerance of priests; it was philosophy; it was freemasonry; it was Mr. Pitt; it was the incurable levity and violence of the national character; it was the issue of that struggle between classes that constitutes the unity of the history of France. Amongst these interpretations we shall have to pick our way; but there are many questions of detail on which I shall be forced to tell you that I have no deciding evidence. * * * * * After the contemporary memoirs, the first historian who wrote with authority was Droz. He was at work for thirty years, having begun in 1811, when Paris was still full of floating information, and he knew much that otherwise did not come out until long after his death. He had consulted Lally Tollendal, and he was allowed to use the memoirs of Malouet, which were in manuscript, and which are unsurpassed for wisdom and good faith in the literature of the National Assembly. Droz was a man of sense and experience, with a true if not a powerful mind; and his book, in point of soundness and accuracy, was all that a book could be in the days when it was written. It is a history of Lewis XVI. during the time when it was possible to bring the Revolution under control; and the author shows, with an absolute sureness of judgment, that the turning-point was the rejection of the first project of Constitution, in September 1789. For him, the Revolution is contained in the first four months. He meant to write a political treatise on the natural history of revolutions, and the art of so managing just demands that unjust and dangerous demands shall acquire no force. It became a history of rejected opportunities, and an indictment of the wisdom of the minister and of the goodness of the king, by a constitutional royalist of the English school. His service to history is that he shows how disorder and crime grew out of unreadiness, want of energy, want of clear thought and definite design. Droz admits that there is a flaw in the philosophy of his title-page. The position lost in the summer of 1789 was never recovered. But during the year 1790 Mirabeau was at work on schemes to restore the monarchy, and it is not plain that they could never have succeeded. Therefore Droz added a volume on the parliamentary career of Mirabeau, and called it an appendix, so as to remain true to his original theory of the fatal limit. We know the great orator better than he could be known in 1842, and the value of Droz's excellent work is confined to the second volume.