No race has ever allowed less of what it has done, suffered, or even only seen, to be lost than the French. It has ever been the ambition of the men of that people to leave some record of themselves. We have to thank what an ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a memoir-literature which would be inadequately praised if it were only called the first in the world. The world has not only no equal, but no second, to be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of Religion, agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in these delightful books. For that we have good reason to be grateful, since this time, full as it was of colour, of ability, of passion, and of the most remote extremes in character, has left us the means of knowing it more fully than we can know our own generation. As it was also an age of great political and religious strife, treatises on politics and religion were naturally written, seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men continued to write. There is more cause for surprise when we meet also with works of science, or on the arts--though the surprise is not perhaps fully justified, since even in the wildest times the great mass of men live their lives very much as in peace. When commotions have reached the point of causing universal disturbance, they soon end. Mankind would starve if they were not suspended. [SN: _A distinction._] Out of all the mass of writing produced in the second half of the sixteenth century in France (or by men who must be assigned to that period but who lived into the seventeenth), which is valuable for one reason or another, all is not literature. Only a part can be read from any other motive than interest in the matter. The historians Palma Cayet, Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres, author of the _Théâtre d’Agriculture_, for instance, will hardly be read for their style, or except by students. [SN: _Sully._] As much must be said of the memoirs of Sully, which are called for short _Les Œconomies Royales_.[104] It is not because this book began to be published at the Château de Sully in 1638 that we must leave it aside, for in matter and spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it because _Les Œconomies Royales_ are wanting in interest. They are of great historical value, and the form is attractive from its mere oddity. Sully employed four secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they are found informing their master, “Monsieur your father had four sons, for whom he had no other ambition than to make them such gallant men that they might raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which the fall of the elder line to the distaff [_i.e._, to female heirs] three times, and the unthrifty courses of his ancestors, and especially of his father, had much diminished it in goods.” Or a little further on, “This [viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also swore to him in such fair terms, with so much confidence, and in so agreeable