explanation is obvious. For the most part we live in other folks' houses
whilst French folks, the military and official world excepted, occupy
their own. Revisit provincial gentry or well-to-do bourgeoisie after an
interval of a quarter of a century, you always find them where they
were. Interiors show no more change than the pyramids of Egypt. Not so
much as sixpence has been laid out upon new carpets or curtains. Could
grandsires and granddames return to life like the Sleeping Beauty, they
would find that the world had stood still during their slumber.

Melun possesses perhaps one of the few statues that may not be called
superfluous, and I confess I had been attracted thither rather by
memories of its greatest son than by its picturesque scenery and fine
old churches. The first translator of Plutarch into his native tongue
was born here, and as we should expect, has been worthily commemorated
by his fellow citizens. A most charming statue of Amyot stands in front
of the grey, turreted Hotel de Ville. In sixteenth century doctoral
dress, loose flowing robes and square flat cap, sits the great
scholiast, as intently absorbed in his book as St. Jerome in the
exquisite canvas of our own National Gallery.

Behind the Hotel de Ville an opening shows a small, beautifully kept
flower garden, just now a blaze of petunias, zinnias, and a second crop
of roses. Long I lingered before this noble monument, one only of the
many raised to Amyot's memory, of whom Montaigne wrote:--

"Ignoramuses that we are, we should all have been lost, had not this
book (the translation of Plutarch) dragged us out of the mire; thanks to
it, we now venture to write and to discourse."

And musing on the scholar and his kindred, a favourite line of