glittering panoply of 'grand seigneur, conte, baron, chevalier, et
escuier', with their high-sounding titles and their gallant prowess, one
forgets the reverse side of all this glory--the ravaged fields, the
smoking villages, the ruined peasants--the long desolation of France.

The Chronicles of Froissart are history seen through the eyes of a
herald; the _Memoirs_ of PHILIPPE DE COMMYNES are history envisaged by a
politician and a diplomatist. When Commynes wrote--towards the close of
the fifteenth century--the confusion and strife which Froissart had
chronicled with such a gusto were things of the past, and France was
beginning to emerge as a consolidated and centralized state. Commynes
himself, one of the confidential ministers of Louis XI, had played an
important part in this development; and his book is the record of the
triumphant policy of his crafty and sagacious sovereign. It is a fine
piece of history, written with lucidity and firmness, by a man who had
spent all his life behind the scenes, and who had never been taken in.
The penetration and the subtlety of Commynes make his work interesting
chiefly for its psychological studies and for the light that it throws
on those principles of cunning statecraft which permeated the politics
and diplomacy of the age and were to receive their final exposition in
the _Prince_ of Machiavelli. In his calm, judicious, unaffected pages we
can trace the first beginnings of that strange movement which was to
convert the old Europe of the Middle Ages, with its universal Empire and
its universal Church, into the new Europe of independent secular
nations--the Europe of to-day.

Commynes thus stands on the brink of the modern world; though his style
is that of his own time, his matter belongs to the future: he looks
forward into the Renaissance. At the opposite end of the social scale
from this rich and powerful diplomatist, VILLON gave utterance in