Charles Francis II, published in 1916, a notable book with interest not at all dependent upon reflected glory. Of Brooks Adams one must read at least The Emancipation of Massachusetts and the introduction to The Degradation of Democratic Dogma, and then one is tantalized on into The Law of Civilization and Decay, America's Economic Supremacy, and The Theory of Social Revolutions. Finally one approaches Henry's Education not quite unprepared and not over-looking the fact that, besides biographies of Gallatin and Randolph, he wrote what has been called "incomparably the best" history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, in nine volumes distinguished by lucid impartiality, and Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, an interpretation of the twelfth century as impressive in height and span as the great cathedral which Adams takes as the symbol of his thought.
Historians, of course, are familiar with all these paths. I should like, however, to commend them a little to gentler and less learned readers. Taken not as material for history but as the story of four generations of great personalities, living always near the center of American life, the Adams annals surpass anything we have produced in fiction. One may plunge into them as into the Comédie Humaine of Balzac or Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and happily lose contact with the world, which, if we may believe Brooks Adams, ultimus Romanorum, is going so fatally to the dogs. Perhaps an Adams of
