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ES morts n'écrivent point," said Madame de Maintenon, who lived in a day of tranquil finalities. If men's passions and vanities were admittedly strong until the hour of dissolution, the finger of death obliterated all traces of them; and the supreme dignity of this obliteration sustained noble minds and solaced the souls that believed. An age which produced the Oraisons Funèbres had an unquenchable reverence for the grave.

Echoes of Madame de Maintenon's soothing conviction ring pleasantly through the intervening centuries. Book-making, which she knew only in its smiling infancy, had grown to ominous proportions when the Hon. Augustine Birrell, brooding over the fatality which had dipped the world in ink, comforted 31