be admitted, did not; but, after all, the exact point in Edinburgh where Montrose was hanged is of no vital importance to anybody. What is important is that we should feel the conflicting passions of that stormy time, that we should regard them with equal sanity and sympathy, and that the death of Montrose should have for us more significance than it appears to have for Mr. Gardiner. Better Froissart's courtly lamentations over the death of every gallant knight than this studied indifference to the sombre stories which history has inscribed for us on her scroll.
For the old French chronicler would have agreed cordially with Landor: "We might as well, in a drama, place the actors behind the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there, as, in a history, push back valiant men." Froissart is enamored of valor wherever he finds it; and he shares Carlyle's reverence not only for events, but for the controlling forces which have moulded them. "The history of mankind," says Carlyle, about whose opinions there is seldom any room for doubt, "is the history of its great men;" and Froissart, whose knowledge is of that narrow and
