In a democratic state he should flatter the Diet—and feed it, for good cheer is an admirable road to influence. He should have a flair for nosing out secrets as well as a genius for hiding them; his use of spies is the test, almost the measure, of his excellence. “The wise and enlightened negotiator must of course be a good Christian.” Machiavelli explained princely policy and Chesterfield worldly polish no more lucidly than Callières, who was private secretary to the Most Christian King Louis XIV and ambassador and plenipotentiary entrusted with the Treaty of Ryswick, explained the devices and virtues of his craft. He had high standards for diplomatists; he wanted them to be better-trained, better valued, and better rewarded than they were. He thought they should be men of letters and men of peace. He would not have held himself to blame for assuming that the relation between even friendly princes was that of ceaseless rivalry and that the first interest of each was to take something from the others. Those were the assumptions of the age. Callières was merely pointing out, with tact and charm, how the members of the diplomatic corps might best observe all the punctilios that go with honour among the most precious thieves. LAWYER AND ELEGIST Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, _Farmington_. It has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition, of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s _Farmington_, it is true, lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above facts. To _Farmington_ they impart a firmness which enables an honest reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s _Hannibal_ never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies a limitation of _Farmington_, its lack of a large masculine vitality.