Publisher's Synopsis
A TASTE for literary exhumations is one of the distinctive features of the literature of the period. Nothing, to judge from the number of biographies and memoirs that are constantly being published, seems to afford the reading public more entertainment than to shake the dust from old parchments and the private correspondence of the famous dead, to sit down, so to speak, on the threshold of a vanished age and peer at the passions, morals, and customs of times that are no more. Thanks to the indefatigable efforts to satisfy the craving for historical and psychological revelations, many new and interesting facts have been unearthed, and not a few personalities, formerly misunderstood or despised, have been placed on pedestals that ignorance or malice had hitherto denied them; while others have, in their turn, been removed from the niches they had long and undeservingly occupied. How many kings and statesmen, cardinals and soldiers, philosophers and adventurers have been resurrected from the vast cemetery of History in which their memory is buried, and paraded for our edification ! And what swarms of women are likewise continually flitting past us ! Women of all ranks and descriptions: serious and chaste, frivolous and erring; saintly paragons in royal mantles, and adorable sinners en deshabille.
