M. Funck-Brentano, whom I have the honour of introducing here to the English public, belongs to the same class. Of literary parentage and connections--his uncle is Professor Lujo Brentano, whose work on the English trade gilds is a standard--he entered in his twentieth year the École des Chartes, the famous institution which trains men in the methods of historical research. At the end of his three years' course, he was appointed to succeed François Ravaisson in the work of classifying the archives of the Bastille in the Arsenal Library,--a work which occupied him for more than ten years. One fruit of it is to be seen in the huge catalogue of more than one thousand pages, printed under official auspices and awarded the Prix Le Dissez de Penanrum by the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Another is the present work, which has been crowned by the French Academy. Meanwhile M. Funck-Brentano had been pursuing his studies at the Sorbonne and at Nancy, and his French thesis for the doctorate in letters was a volume on the origins of the Hundred Years' War, which obtained for him the highest possible distinction for a work of erudition in France, the Grand Prix Gobert. This volume he intends to follow up with two others, completing a social rather than a military history of the war, and this no doubt he regards as his _magnum opus_. He is known also as a lecturer in Belgium and Alsace as well as in Paris, and being general secretary of the Société des Etudes historiques and deputy professor of history at the College of France as well as sub-librarian of the Arsenal Library, he leads a busy life. Trained in the rigorous methods of the École des Chartes and inspired by the examples of Fustel de Coulanges and M. Paul Meyer, M. Funck-Brentano has developed a most interesting and conscientious method of his own. He depends on original sources, and subjects these to the most searching critical tests; but this is a matter of course: his individuality appears in regard to the publication of the results of his researches. When he has discoveries of importance to communicate, he gives them to the world first in the form of articles or studies in reviews of standing, thus preparing public opinion, and at the same time affording opportunities for the search-light of criticism to play on his work. Some of the chapters of this book thus appeared in the various _revues_, and have subsequently gone through a severe process of pruning and amending. It is now eleven years since the first appearance, in the pages of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, of the study of Latude which, in a much altered shape, now forms one of the most interesting portions of this book. The coming autumn will see the publication in France of a striking work by M. Funck-Brentano on the amazing poison-dramas at Louis XIV.'s court, and of this book also the several sections have been appearing at intervals for several years past.