By help of text-books of history, and the memoirs of Pierre de l'estoile, I have made a sort of back ground of the times in which his fourscore years were spent. I had intended to set the 7our7zeys in Diverse Places at the beginning of this book, making the rest of it a commentary upon them; but it seemed better, after all, to give them their proper place in the story of his life. Yet they, of course, are the one thing here to be read again and again.