its way, uncertain, sensitive and impressionable, but sincere and
ardent in the cause of truth.

Some chapters of the book have a family likeness to the meditations
of our old French moralists and the stoical essays of the end of the
XVIth century. At a time resembling our own but even exceeding it
in tragic horror, amid the convulsions of the League, the
Chief-Magistrate Guillaume Du Vair wrote his noble Dialogues, "De la
Constance et Consolation ès Calamités Publiques," with a steadfast
mind. While the siege of Paris was at its worst he talked in his
garden with his friends, Linus the great traveller, Musée, Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine, and the writer Orphée. Poor wretches lay dead of
starvation in the streets, women cried out that pike-men were eating
children near the Temple; but with their eyes filled with these
horrible pictures these wise men sought to raise their unhappy
thoughts to the heights where one can reach the mind of the ages
and reckon up that which has survived the test. As I re-read these
Dialogues during the war I more than once felt myself close to that
true Frenchman who wrote: Man is born to see and know everything, and
it is an injustice to limit him to one place on the earth. To the wise
man the whole world is his country. God lends us the world to enjoy in
common on one condition only, that we act uprightly.

R.R.

PARIS,

May, 1920