This book is one of that majestic series, among the most majestic of the set, and, with regard to the social period that it describes--its institutions, its classes, its manners, its virtues and its crimes, and the characters that it builds--the most instructive treatise on feudalism, at the very time when the bourgeois or capitalist class was struggling for a foot-hold, and beginning to break through the thick feudal incrustation above.
