As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called History, who
can have failed to note that the writers of all periods, in Egypt,
Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten to give us a history of
manners? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans
excites rather than satisfies our curiosity. It was from observing
this great void in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy
devoted his life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in _Le Jeune
Anacharsis_.

But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons
which society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time,
please the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry
and philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the
importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I
saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers
had spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in
depicting one aspect of life. It was with this idea that I read the
works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, or finder
(_trouvere=trouveur_), had just then given an aspect of grandeur to a
class of composition unjustly regarded as of the second rank. Is it
not really more difficult to compete with personal and parochial
interests by writing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge,
Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil
Blas, Ossian, Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, Corinne,
Adolphe, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe,
Manfred, Mignon, than to set forth in order facts more or less similar
in every country, to investigate the spirit of laws that have fallen
into desuetude, to review the theories which mislead nations, or, like
some metaphysicians, to explain what _Is_? In the first place, these