The history of Amedee Gabourd is a far better book, and perhaps the best of its kind. Gabourd had previously written a history of France, and his many volumes on the nineteenth century, with no pretension in point of research, are convenient for the lower range of countries and events. He writes with the care, the intelligence, the knowledge of the work of other men, which distinguish Charles Knight's _Popular History of England_. I have known very deep students indeed who were in the habit of constantly using him. He says, with reason, that no writer has sought truth and justice with more perfect good faith, or has been more careful to keep aloof from party spirit and accepted judgments. As he was a constitutionalist, the revolution of February was the ruin of a system which he expected to last for ever, and to govern the last age of the world. But Gabourd remained true to his principles. He wrote: "I shall love the people, and honour the king; and I shall have the same judgment on the tyranny from above and the tyranny from below. I am not one of those who set a chasm between liberty and religion, as if God would accept no worship but that of servile hearts. I shall not oppose the results of the event which I describe, or deny the merit of what had been won at the price of so much suffering." * * * * * The Doctrinaires were of all men in the best position to understand the Revolution and to judge it rightly. They had no weakness for the ancient monarchy, none for the republic; and they accepted the results rather than the motives. They rejoiced in the reign of reason, but they required the monarchy duly limited, and the church as established by the Concordat, in order to resume the chain of history and the reposing influence of custom. They were the most intellectual group of statesmen in the country; but, like the Peelites, they were leaders without followers, and it was said of them that they were only four, but pretended to be five, to strike terror by their number. Guizot, the greatest writer among them, composed, in his old age, a history of France for his grandchildren. It was left incomplete, but his discourses on the Revolution, the topic he had thought about all his life, were edited by his family. These tales of a grandfather are not properly his work, and, like the kindred and coequal lectures of Niebuhr, give approximately the views of a man so great that it is a grief not to possess them in authentic form.