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ture of social life and of the great storm-cloud darkening over France. In his pages we can breathe freely, unchoked by that lurid and sulphuric atmosphere so popular with historians and novelists rehearsing "on the safe side of prophecy." His courage is of the unsentimental order, his perceptions are pitiless, his common sense is invulnerable. He has the purest contempt for the effusive oath-taking of July 14, the purest detestation for the crimes and cruelties that followed. He persistently treads the earth, and is in no way dazzled by the mad flights into ether which were so hopelessly characteristic of the time. Not even Sir Walter Scott—a man as unlike Morris as day is unlike night—could be more absolutely free from the unwholesome influences which threatened the sanity of the world, and of Scott's journal it is difficult to speak with self-possession. Our thanks are due primarily to Lord Byron, whose Ravenna diary first started Sir Walter on this daily task,—a task which grew heavier when the sad years came, but which shows us now, as no word from other lips or other pen could ever show us, the splendid courage, the boundless charity, the simple,