To have been a student in Paris in the early thirteenth century, to have seen the foundation of the Dominican Order, to have been present at the coronation of St. Louis and to have assisted at the Council of Lyons ; to have spent one’s early manhood in missionary journeys and one’s riper years as an Inquisitor, knowing France from end to end and acquainted with all the important people of one’s time ; surely such fullness of life as this would justify a man, if ever anything could, in writing his autobiography.