imagination is filled with the cruel sufferings of man, and he hails with a profound enthusiasm the moment when the victim that could not die, in a furious act of retribution, avenged the martyrdom of a thousand years. The acquisition of rights, the academic theory, touches him less than the punishment of wrong. There is no forgiveness for those who resist the people rising in the consciousness of its might. What is good proceeds from the mass, and what is bad from individuals. Mankind, ignorant in regard to nature, is a righteous judge of the affairs of man. The light which comes to the learned from reflection comes to the unlearned more surely by natural inspiration; and power is due to the mass by reason of instinct, not by reason of numbers. They are right by dispensation of heaven, and there is no pity for their victims, if you remember the days of old. Michelet had no patience with those who sought the pure essence of the Revolution in religion. He contrasts the agonies with which the Church aggravated the punishment of death with the swift mercy of the guillotine, and prefers to fall into Danton's hands rather than into those of Lewis IX. or Torquemada. With all this, by the real sincerity of his feeling for the multitude, by the thoroughness of his view and his intensely expressive language, he is the most illuminating of the democratic historians. We often read of men whose lives have been changed because a particular book has fallen into their hands, or, one might say, because they have fallen into the hands of a particular book. It is not always a happy accident; and one feels that things would have gone otherwise with them if they had examined Sir John Lubbock's List of Best Books, or what I would rather call the St. Helena library, containing none but works adequate and adapted to use by the ablest man in the full maturity of his mind. Of such books, that are strong enough, in some eminent quality, to work a change and form an epoch in a reader's life, there are two, perhaps, on our revolutionary shelf. One is Taine, and the other Michelet. The fourth work of the revolutionary party, that was written almost simultaneously with these, is that of Villiaume. Lamartine esteemed Vergniaud. Louis Blanc esteemed Robespierre, Michelet, Danton. Villiaume went a step farther, and admired Marat. He had lived much in the surviving families of revolutionary heroes, and received, he says, the last breath of an expiring tradition. He had also gathered from Chateaubriand what he remembered; and Thierry, who was blind, caused his book to be read to him twice over.