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“the Land beloved by every soul that loves and serves its kind.”

Before closing my preface to this Selection from the sketches, essays and criticisms of Paris life, under its picturesque, popular, literary and social aspects that represents John F. Macdonald’s interpretation of the spirit of the “Amazing City,” between 1907 and 1914, I have to acknowledge the kindness of the several Editors, to whom these different articles were originally addressed; and who have allowed me to reprint them in the present volume. The Roué, In a Cellar, and The Affair of the Collars, appeared originally in The Morning Post. The three articles, On Strike, the two pictures of the historical Pension de Famille in the Rue des Poitevins (haunted by the memory of Gambetta), and of the other Pension de Famille in the Shadow of St Sulpice, saddened by the memory of the pathetic story of the gentle and pious old maids who died broken-hearted, as victims of the Rochette swindle, appeared in The Morning Leader, in the days before its association with The Daily News. The series of short sketches of French Presidents and Leading Statesmen, and Personalities, who have helped to make, and are still living influences in, French politics, were contributed, later, to The Daily News and Morning Leader. I have to thank the Editor of The Contemporary Review for consenting to the reprinting of the articles upon Henri Rochefort and Royal Visits to Paris; and the Editor of The Fortnightly Review for allowing me to reproduce from the series of articles on French Life and the French Stage, which appeared in this Review during several years, three special criticisms, illustrative of the typical French national “virtue,”—a fundamental understanding of the essential duty of man to be an intelligent and kindly human being—applied to the correction and sweetening of faulty rules of “Bohemian” morality and bourgeois respectability; and lending high ideals to what is generally described as the “realistic” spirit of the modern French drama. The articles descriptive of life in the Latin Quarter appeared originally in The Saturday Review.