'"Yes," said Tocqueville, "it does, meaning by noble, _gentilhomme_; and it is a great misfortune, since it keeps up distinctions and animosities of caste; but it is incurable--at least, it has not been cured, or perhaps much palliated, by our sixty years of revolution. It is a sort of Freemasonry. When I talk to a _gentilhomme_, though we have not two ideas in common, though all his opinions, wishes, and thoughts are opposed to mine, yet I feel at once that we belong to the same family, that we speak the same language, that we understand one another. I may like a bourgeois better, but he is a stranger." I mentioned the remark to me of a very sensible Prussian, _buerger_ himself, that it was unwise to send out as ambassador any not noble. I said it did not matter in England, where the distinction is unknown. "Yes," he replied, "unknown with you; but you may be sure that when any of our _buerger_ ministers meets one who is _von Adel_, he does not negociate with him on equal terms; he is always wishing to sneak under the table."' In these conversations, preserved in a separate series of Senior's Journals, we have the best, latest, and wisest, of De Tocqueville's thoughts; none the less valuable, and to English readers all the more intelligible and impressive, that we have them in undress; put into the terse, pithy, concentrated style of summarized oral conversation by the recorder, instead of being elaborately tricked out in all the formal grace of French literary diction by one of the most fastidious of French writers. Senior, who habitually wrote down in his Journals the conversation of the great, wise, and thoughtful--the leaders of political action or literary criticism, the statesmen and thinkers--with whom in the course of a leisurely life of social observation he was brought into intimate intercourse, had a gift of getting from each man the best he had to give. His friends knew that their table-talk was recorded, often themselves read and corrected the record, and therefore gave him what they were willing to give not to the contemporary world, but to posterity; those opinions upon the current facts of the day by which they were willing to be judged hereafter. No opinions upon the tendencies and consequences, the prospects and passions, the strength and weakness of democracy, could well be more valuable than those which the painter of Democracy in America--after the experience of many years in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,--delivered for the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had