Selections from Saint-Simon. Edited by Arthur Tilley. (Cambridge University Prem.
7s. 6d. net.)—The stoutest reader quails before the serried volumes of Saint-Simon, though he knows them to contain many fascinating things. We are grateful to Mr. Tilley for making some of Saint-Simon's best passages readily accessible in this volume, to which is prefixed a good biographical and critical Introduction. There is, for example, the famous account of Louis XIV.'s .daily life of Court routine that would -send any ordinary Englishman mad in a week. Then, too, there is the description of the death
of Monseigneur the Dauphin in 1711, with the terrible summing- up of that prince as a man who " etoit sans vice ni vertu, sans hunieres ni connoiasances quel- conques, radicalement incapable d'en aequerir, tree pareaseux, sans imagination ni production, sans goat, sans c oix, sans discernement, ne pour l'ennui qu'il communiquoit aux sutras et pour etre une boule roulante au hasard par l'impulsion d'autrui."
Saint-Simon was a good hater, all the more because the early death of Monseigneur's son, the Duo de Bourgogne, whom the diarist loved, was a bitter disappointment to him. In the Duke's son, Louis the Well-Beloved, France was after all to have the "pernicious King" that the old Dauphin had promised to be. Mr. Tilley has chosen well and rightly gives long extracts. Saint-Simon was too diffuse to be properly appreciated in spoonfuls.
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