The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 54, April, 1862

But a large part of the volume before us is made up of poems that do not belong to this Irish series, and the readers of the "Atlantic" will find in it several pieces which they will recognize with pleasure as having first appeared in our own pages, and which, once read, were not to be readily forgotten. Mr. De Vere has expressed in several passages his warm sympathy in our national affairs, and his clear appreciation of the great cause, so little understood abroad, which we of the North are engaged in upholding and maintaining. And although in these days of war there is little reading of poetry, and little chance that this volume will find the welcome it deserves and would receive in quieter times in America, we yet trust that it will meet with worthy readers among those who possess their souls in quietness in the midst of the noise of arms, and to such we heartily commend it.

A Book about Doctors. By J. CORDY JEAFFRESON, Author of "Novels and Novelists," "Crewe Else," etc., etc. New York: Rudd & Carleton. 12mo.

Mr. Jeaffreson is not usually either a brilliant or a sensible man with pen in hand, albeit he dates from "Rolls Chambers, Chancery Lane." He is apt to select slow coaches, whenever he attempts a ride. His "Novels and Novelists" is a sad move in the "deadly lively" direction, and his "Crewe Rise" has not risen to much distinction among the reading crew. In those volumes of departed rubbish he sinks very low, whenever he essays to mount; but his dulness is innoxious, for few there be who can say, "We have read him." His "Book about Doctors" is the best literary venture he has yet made. It is not a dull volume. The anecdotes so industriously collected keep attention alert, and one feels inclined to applaud Mr. Jeaffreson as the leaves of his book are turned.

Everything about Doctors is interesting. Here are a few Bible verses which it will do no harm to quote in connection with Mr. Jeaffreson's volume:—

"Honor a physician with the honor due unto him for the uses which you have made of him: for the Lord hath created him."

"For of the Most High cometh healing, and he shall receive honor of the king."

"The skill of the physician shall lift up his head; and in the sight of great men he shall be in admiration."

"The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them."

It was no unwise thing in Mr. Jeaffreson to bring so many noble men together, as it were into one family. What "names embalmed" one meets with in the collection! Here are Sydenham, Goldsmith, Smollett, Sir Thomas Browne, and a golden line of other Doctors, nearly all the way down to our own time. (Our well-beloved M.D. [Monthly Diamond] contributor is too young to be included.) Keats is among the worthies, although he got no farther into the mysteries than the apothecary's counter. Meeting with this interesting series of splendid medicine-men leads us to muse a good deal about the Faculty, and to re-read several good anecdotes about the great symptom-watchers of the past and the present day.

When Sir Richard Blackmore asked the great Sydenham, "Prince of English physicians," what he would advise him for medical reading, he is said to have replied, "Read Don Quixote, Sir." Sensible and witty old man!

We are struck with the cheerful character of nearly all the M.D.s mentioned in the volume, and are constantly reminded of the advice we once read of an old Doctor to a young one:—"Moreover, let me tell you, my young doctor friend, that a cheerful face, and step, and neckcloth, and button-hole, and an occasional hearty and kindly joke, a power of executing and setting a-going a good laugh, are stock in our trade not to be despised."

"I may give an instance," says the same good-natured physician, "when a joke was more and better than itself. A comely young wife, the 'cynosure' of her circle, was in bed, apparently dying from swelling and inflammation of the throat, an inaccessible abscess stopping the way; she could swallow nothing; everything had been tried. Her friends were standing round the bed in misery and helplessness. 'Try her wi' a compliment,' said her husband, in a not uncomic despair. She had genuine humor, as well as he; and an physiologists know, there is a sort of mental tickling which is beyond and above control, being under the reflex system, and instinctive as well as sighing. She laughed with her whole body, and burst the abscess, and was well."

Mr. Jeaffreson's book might be better, but it might be worse. We cannot forgive him for his "Novels and Novelists" and his "Crewe Rise," two works which go far to prove their author a person of indefatigable incoherency; but we thank him for the industry which brought together so much that is very readable about Doctors.

John Brent. By THEODORE WINTHROP, Author of "Cecil Dreeme." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.

It is probable that we have not yet completely appreciated the value of the bright and noble life which a wretched Rebel sharp-shooter extinguished in the disastrous fight of Great Bethel. "John Brent" is a book which gives us important aid in the attempt to form an adequate conception of Winthrop's character. Its vivid pages shine throughout with the author's brave and tender spirit. "Cecil Dreeme" was an embodiment of his thoughts, observations, and imaginations; "John Brent" shows us the inbred poetry and romance of the man in the grander form of action. The scene is placed in the wild Western plains of America, among men entirely free from the restraints of conventional life; and the book has a buoyancy and brisk vitality, a dashing, daring, and jubilant vigor, such as we are not accustomed to in ordinary romances of American life. Sir Philip Sidney is the type of the Anglo-Saxon hero; but we think that Winthrop was fully his match in delicacy and intrepidity, in manly courage, and in sweet, instinctive tenderness. As to style, the American far exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the "Arcadia" an imperfect exponent of Sidney's nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed in the form he adopts for their expression. But Winthrop is as fresh, natural, strong, and direct in his language as in his life. He used words, not for ornament, but for expression. Every phrase is stamped by a die supplied by reflection or feeling, and not a paragraph in "John Brent" differs in spirit from the practical heroism which urged the author to expose himself to certain death at Great Bethel. The condensed, lucid, picturesque, and sharp-cut sentences, flooded with will, show the nature of the man,—a man who announced no sentiments and principles he was not willing to sacrifice himself to disseminate or defend. A living energy of soul glows over the whole book,—swift, fiery, brave, wholesome, sincere, impatient of all physical obstacles to the operation of thought and affection, and eager to make stubborn facts yield to the impatient pressure of spiritual purpose.

We cannot say much in praise of the plot of "John Brent," but it at least enables the author to supply a good framework for his incidents, descriptions, and characters. The plot is based rather on possibilities than probabilities; but the men and women he depicts are thoroughly natural. It would be difficult to point to any other American novel which furnishes incidents that can compare in vigor and vividness with some of the incidents in this romance. The ride to rescue Helen Clitheroe from her kidnappers is a masterpiece, worthy to rank with the finest passages of Cooper or Scott. The fierce, swift black stallion, "Don Fulano," a horse superior to any which Homer has immortalized, is almost the hero of the romance. That Winthrop, with all his sympathy with the "advanced" ideas and sentiments of the reformers and philanthropists of the time, was not a mere prattling and scribbling sentimentalist, is proved by his glorious idealization of this magnificent horse. He raises the beast into a moral and intellectual sympathy with his human rider, and there is a poetic justice in making him die at last in an attempt to further the escape of a fugitive slave.

The characterization of the book is original. Gerrian, Jake Shamberlain, Armstrong, Sizzum, the Mormon preacher, are absolutely new creations. Hugh Clitheroe may suggest Dickens's Skimpole and Hawthorne's Clifford, but the character is developed under entirely new circumstances. As for Wade and Brent, they are persons whom we all recognize as the old heroes of romance, though the conditions under which they act are changed. Helen, the heroine of the story, is a more puzzling character to the critic; but, on the whole, we are bound to say that she is a new development of womanhood. The author exhausts all the resources of his genius in giving a "local habitation and a name" to this fond creation of his imagination, and he has succeeded. Helen Clitheroe promises to be one of those "beings of the mind" which will he permanently remembered.

Heroism, active or passive, is the lesson taught by this romance, and we know that the author, in his life, illustrated both phases of the quality. His novels, which, when he was alive, the booksellers refused to publish, are now passing through their tenth and twelfth editions. Everybody reads "Cecil Dreeme" and "John Brent," and everybody must catch a more or less vivid glimpse of the noble nature of their author. But these books give but an imperfect expression of the soul of Theodore Winthrop. They have great merits, but they are still rather promises than performances. They hint of a genius which was denied full development. The character, however, from which they derive their vitality and their power to please, shines steadily through all the imperfections of plot and construction. The novelist, after all, only suggests the power and beauty of the man; and the man, though dead, will keep the novels alive. Through them we can commune with a rare and noble spirit, called away from earth before all its capacities of invention and action were developed, but still leaving brilliant traces in literature of the powers it was denied the opportunity adequately to unfold.

* * * * *

FOREIGN LITERATURE

To keep pace with the productions of foreign literature is a task beyond the possibilities of any reader. The bibliographical journals of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain weekly present such copious lists of new works, that a mere mention of only the principal ones would far exceed the limits we have proposed to ourselves. However, from the chaos of contemporary productions it is our intention to sift, as far as lies in our power, such works as may with justice be styled representative of the country in which they are produced. Ranging in this introductory article through the year 1861, we shall limit ourselves to a few of the contributions upon French literary history.

No branch of letters is richer at the present time than that in which the writer, laying aside all thought of direct creativeness, confines himself to the criticism of the works of the past or present, analyzing and studying the influences that have been brought to hear upon the poet, historian, or novelist, anatomizing literature and resolving it into its elements, pointing out the action exercised upon thought and expression by the age, and seeking the effects of these upon society and politics as well as upon the general tastes and moral being of a generation. Methods of writing are now discussed rather than put in practice. We are in a transition age more than politically. Creative genius seems to be resting for more marked and permanent channels to be formed; so that, though every year gives birth to numberless works in every branch of art, original production is rarer than the activity, the restlessness of the time might lead us to expect.

In no country has literary criticism more life than in France. It engages the attention of the best minds. No writer, whatever be his speciality, thinks it derogatory to give long and elaborate notices in the daily press of new books or new editions of old books. Thus, Sainte-Beuve in the "Moniteur," De Sacy, Saint-Marc Girardin, Philarète Chasles, Prévost-Paradol in the "Journal des Débats," not to mention the numerous writers of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," the "Européenne," and the "Nationale," vie with each other in extracting from all that appears what is most acceptable to the general reader.

M. Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a type of the avowedly professional critic. Whatever he may accomplish as the historian of Port-Royal, it is to his weekly articles, informal and disconnected as they are, that he owes his high rank among French authors. These "Causeries du Lundi" have now reached the fourteenth volume.[7 - Causeries du Lundi. Par C.A. Sainte-Beuve, de l'Académie Française. Tome Quatorziéme. Paris: Garnier Frères. 12mo. pp. 480.] In the last we find the same easy admiration, facility of approbation, and suppleness that enable him to praise the "Fanny" of Feydeau, calling it a poem, and on the next page to do justice to the last volume of Thiers's "Consulate and Empire," or to the recent publication of the Correspondence of Buffon. The most important articles in the volume are those on Vauvenargues, on the Abbé de Marolles, and on Bonstetten.

Of quite a different school is M. Armand de Pontmartin, who, under the titles of "Causeries du Samedi," "Causeries Littéraires," etc., has now issued over a dozen volumes touching on all points of contemporary letters, often very severe in their strictures. The last, "Les Semaines Littéraires,"[8 - Les Semaines Littéraires. Troisième Série des Causeries Littéraires. Par Armand de Pontmartin. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères. 12mo. pp. 364.] contains notices of late works by Cousin, About, Quinet, Laprade, and others, and concludes with an article on Scribe. Pontmarlin represents the Catholic sentiment in literature. He measures everything as it agrees or disagrees with Legitimacy and Ultramontanism. His works are a continual defence of the Bourbons and the Pope. Modern democracy he cannot pardon. Without seeking to deny the excesses and shortcomings of his own party, he finds an explanation for all in the levelling tendencies of the age. He cannot be too severe on the first French Revolution and its results. "In letters," he tells us, "it has led to materialism and anarchy, while the Bourbons personify for France peace, glory," etc.

Pontmartin is an able representative of the side he has taken. He believes in and ably defends those heroes of literature so well characterized as "Prophets of the Past," Chateaubriand, De Bonald, and J. de Maistre. His special objects of antipathy are writers like Michelet and Quinet, pamphleteers like About, and critics like Sainte-Beuve.

The last he cannot pardon for his work on Chateaubriand,[9 - Chateaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire sous l'Empire. Cours professé à Liége en 1848-1849, par C.A. Sainte-Beuve, de l'Académie Française. Paris: Garnier Frères. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 410, 457.] published in the early part of the year 1861. The time is past for giving a fuller account of this remarkable production of the historian of Port-Royal. Suffice it to say, that, though it deals in very small criticism indeed, though its author seems to have made it his task to sum up all the weaknesses of one the prestige of whose name fills, in France at least, the first half of this century, yet there exists no more valuable contribution to the history of literature under the first Empire. It has been called "a work no one would wish to have written, yet which is read by all with exquisite pleasure." Nothing could be truer.

"Chateaubriand and his Literary Group under the Empire" is a course of twenty-one lectures delivered by Sainte-Beuve at Liège, whither he repaired soon after the Revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris. Fragments of the work appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," among others the paper on Chênedollé, which forms the most interesting portion of the second division. In this are to be found several original letters, now published for the first time, casting much new light on the life of that unfortunate poet.

Of more general interest, however, are the pages on Chateaubriand himself. It was the fate of this writer to be flattered beyond measure in his lifetime, and now come the first judgments of posterity, which deals with him no less harshly than it has already begun to deal with another idol of the French people, Béranger. Sainte-Beuve has constituted himself judge, reversing even his own adulatory articles, as they may be read in the earlier volumes of the "Causeries." It is at best an ungrateful task to dissect a reputation in the way in which we find it done in the present work. It must seem strange to many a reader that the very man who in early life could utter such sweet flattery, who long was the foremost to bear incense, should now consider it his duty "to seek the foot of clay beneath the splendid drapery, and to replace about the statue the aromas of the sanctuary by the perfumes of the boudoir." In spite of this, "Chateaubriand and his Literary Group" must be ranked among the most remarkable of literary biographies. Here the critic gives full scope to his inclination for minute analysis; the history of the author of "René" explains his works, and these in turn are made to tell his life,—that life so full of love of effect, and constant painstaking to seem rather than to be. Even in his religious sentiments the author of the "Genius of Christianity" appears lukewarm, not to say more.

In comprehensive works on literary history France is far from being as rich as Germany. Beyond the native literature little has been accomplished; and even in this, works of importance may be counted on the fingers. The past year saw the conclusion of Nisard's work, the most comprehensive history of French literature. The fourth volume[10 - Histoire de la Literature Française. Par D. Nisard, de l'Académie Française, Inspecteur-Général de l'Enseignement Supérieur. Tome Quatrième, Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, Fils, et Cie. 8vo. pp. 584.] is devoted to the eighteenth century, and concludes with a few general chapters on the nineteenth.

The work of M. Gerusez, "History of French Literature from its Origin to the Devolution,"[11 - Histoire de la Littérature Française, depuis ses Origines jusqu'à la Revolution. Par Eugène Gerusez. Paris: Didier et Cie. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 488, 507.] although it had the honor of being considered worthy of the prix Gobert by the French Academy, is far from satisfying the requirements of general literary history. It may rather be considered a systematic series of essays, beginning with the "Chansons de Geste," analyzing several poems of the cycle of Charlemagne, and followed by successive independent chapters on the Middle Ages, the revival of letters, and modern times down to the Revolution. It will be remembered that in 1859 M. Gerusez published a "History of Literature during the French Revolution, 1789-1800." This also obtained a prize from the Academy,—much more deservedly, we think, than the last production, when we consider the interest he cast over the literary efforts of a period much more marked by action than by artistic productiveness of any kind. The German writer Schmidt-Weiszenfels in the same year issued a work with the pretentious title, "History of the Revolution-Literature of France."[12 - Geschichte der Französischen Revolutions-Literatur, 1789-1795. Von Schmidt-Weiszenfels. Prague: Kober und Markgraf. 8vo. pp. 395.] This is little more than a declamatory production, wanting in what is most characteristic of the German mind, original research. The "Literary History of the National Convention,"[13 - Histoire Littéraire de la Convention Nationale. Par Eugène Maron. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Boise. 12mo. pp. 359.] by E. Maron, is devoted more to politics than to letters.

To return to the volumes of M. Gerusez. It is rather a sign of poverty in general literary history, that detached sketches, with little connection beyond their chronological order, should have been deemed worthy of the prize and the praises awarded to them. However, though lacking in comprehensive views such as we have a right to expect from an author who attempts to portray the rise, growth, and full expansion of a literature, the work of M. Gerusez may be perused with pleasure and profit by the student. It is clear and satisfactory in the details. Thus, the pages devoted to the writers of the "Encyclopédie," though few, may vie with any that have been written to set in their true light men whose influence was so great on the generation that succeeded them. If impartiality consisted in always steering in the juste-milieu, M. Gerusez would be the most impartial of historians. As it is, we have to thank him for a good book, regretting only that he has gone no farther.

Far otherwise is it with M. Saint-Marc Girardin. The eloquent Sorbonne professor has seen his fame increase with every new volume of his "Course of Dramatic Literature." We have now the fourth volume.[14 - Cours de Littérature Dramatique. Par Saint-Marc Girardin, de l'Académie Française, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris, Membre du Conseil Impérial de l'Instruction Publique. Tome IV. Paris: Charpentier.] "A Course of Dramatic Literature";—it is more. It is the history of the expression of Passion among the ancients and the moderns, by no means confined to the drama. The present volume, as well as the third, published several years ago, is devoted to the analysis of Love as expressed in different ages and by different nations, under the two divisions of L'Amour Ingénu and L'Amour Conjugal.

The first he had studied in the authors of antiquity in his third volume, beginning in this with the episode of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius; then following up, through the moderns, the expression of Ingenuous Love in Corneille, La Fontaine, Sédaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Milton, Gessner, Voss, André Chénier, and Chateaubriand. For the last he finds more blame than praise. Indeed, this effect-seeking writer, with all his genius, seemed less fitted than any one to express the natural and spontaneous. His Atala, who charms us so at the first reading, deals in studied emotions. As to René, his is the vain sentimentality parading its own impotency for higher feelings, a virtual boasting of want of soul,—the sickly dissatisfaction of Werther, without his passion for an excuse. M. Saint-Marc Girardin then follows up his subject through later authors, even in Madame George Sand and in Madame Émile de Girardin. He is particularly severe upon Lamartine, that poet "who for more than thirty years seemed best to express love as our century understands it," but who in Raphael and Graziella destroyed, by disclosing too much, the power of his "Méditations Poétiques."

On Conjugal Love the classic models are first consulted,—Oenone, Evadne, Medea,—these characters being followed through the delineation of modern dramatists. We know of no more exquisite criticism than the pages devoted to Griseldis. Analyzing the accounts of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Perault, our author concludes with the play of "Munck Bellinghausen." The last chapters, on "Love and Duty," are among the most eloquently written in the volume. For style, M. Saint-Marc Girardin is second to no living author of France.

In this course we find an evident predilection for the models of antiquity. When a comparison is instituted between the ancients and the moderns, we feel pretty certain of the result before the writer has proceeded very far. Not that we ever find a systematic idolizing of all that is classic merely. Far from it. Modern writers are not neglected. In this particular a genuine service is done to critical literature. It often seems as if literary lecturers and historians were attacked by an aesthetic presbyopy. For them the present age never produces anything worth even a passing remark. The masterpieces they notice must be old and time-honored. Not so in the present studies on the passions. Ponsard finds his place side by side with older names. After an appreciative notice of the Lucretia of Livy, we find a comment on the Lucretia which may have been played the week before at the Théâtre Français. Nor is it a slight service done to contemporary letters, when a master-critic turns his thoughts to works which, if they do not hold the first rank, yet, by the talent of their authors and the nature of their subjects, have attracted all eyes for a time. Such are the writings of Madame George Sand. Of these, "André," "La Mare au Diable," and "La Petite Fadette" are reviewed with praise in the work under consideration, while the force of criticism is expended on "Indiana," "Lelia," and "Jacques."

* * * * *

Whatever claims the academician Victor de Laprade may have to poetic talent, he certainly sinks below mediocrity when he attempts to discuss the principles of the art he practises. Since it has been his good-fortune to be numbered among the illustrious Forty he has several times attempted literary criticism, but never so extensively as in his last work, "Questions d'Art et de Morale."[15 - Questions d'Art et de Morale. Par Victor de Laprade, de l'Académie Française. Paris: Didier et Cie. 8vo.] This is a series of discursive essays, a few upon art in general, the greater part, however, restricted to letters; the whole written in a poetic prose not without a certain charm, but wearisome for continuous reading.

The object of M. de Laprade is to defend what he calls "Spiritualism in Art." He wages an unrelenting war against the modern school of Realism. It is not the representation of visible Nature that the artist must seek; his aim must be "the representation of the invisible." He grows eloquent when he develops his favorite theories, and always succeeds in interesting when he applies them successively to all the arts. As to the author's political opinions, he takes no pains to conceal them. His work is an outcry against equality and universal suffrage. He traces the apathy of poetic creativeness in France to the sovereignty usurped everywhere "by the inferior elements of intelligence in the State." He seems to think, that, as humanity grows older, art falls from its divine ideal. Of contemporary architecture, he says that it can produce nothing original save railroad depots and crystal palaces. "A glass architecture is the only one that fully belongs to our age." Music, the "vaguest and most sensuous of all the arts," he regards as the art of the present. The religious worship of the future appears to him "a symphony with a thousand instruments executed under a dome of glass."

As to the purely literary essays of M. de Laprade, they may be read both with more pleasure and more profit than those in which he attempts to discuss the principles of aesthetics. "French Tradition in Literature," and "Poetry, and Industrialism," are full of suggestive thoughts, and, coming in the latter half of the volume, make us forget the pretentious nature of the first.

* * * * *

M. Gustave Merlet is a more modest opponent of some of the tendencies of the age. He presents his first book to the public under the title, "Réalisme et Fantaisie,"[16 - : Le Réalisme et la Fantaisie dans la Littérature. Par Gustave Merlet. Paris: Didier et Cie. 12mo. pp. 431.] earnestly and loyally attacking the two extremes of literature.

Two styles of writing, diametrically opposed in every particular, have of late years flourished in the lighter productions of France. Some there are who would seek to incarnate in letters Nature as it is, without adornings, without ideal additions. The cry of the upholders of this doctrine is: Truth in art, war against the freaks of the imagination that colors all in unreal tints. The writers who have adopted such sentiments have been termed "Realists," much to their dissatisfaction. Balzac was the greatest of them. Champfleury may be called the most strenuous supporter of the system. There is a certain force, a false air of truth, in this daguerreotype process of writing, that seduces at first sight. When a man of some genius, as Gustave Flaubert in "Madame Bovary," undertakes to paint Nature, he sets details otherwise revolting in such relief that the very novelty and boldness of the attempt put us off our guard, and we are in danger of admitting as beauties what, after all, are only audacities.

The other extreme into which the literature of the day in France has fallen is an excess of fancy. A writer like Arsène Houssaye will write his "King Voltaire" or his "Madame de Pompadour," or Capefigue his "Madame de la Vallière," in which the judgment seems to have been set aside, and historical facts accumulated in some opium-dream are strangely woven into a narrative representing reality, with about as much truth as Oriental arabesques, or the adornings of richly wrought tapestry. This extreme is even more dangerous than the former, for it makes of letters a mere plaything, and recommends itself to many by its very faults. Paradox and overdrawn scenes usurp the place of the real. The world presented by the exclusive worshippers of fancy is little better than that "Pompadour" style of painting in which the carnation-tipped checks of shepherds and shepherdesses take the place of a too healthy Rubens-like portraiture. There are dainty, well-trimmed lambs, with pretty blue favors tied about their necks, just like dragées and bonbons. As we wander among those opera-swains in silk hose and those shepherdesses in satin bodices, their perfumes tire and nauseate, till we fairly wish for a good breeze wafted from some farm-yard, reconciled in a measure to the extravagances of the so-called "school of Nature."

M. Merlet's subject, it may be seen, is of interest merely to the student of the latest French literature. A more comprehensive study would not have been out of place in his volume. To those who may be interested in writers like Murger, Feydeau, Houssaye, and Brifaut, the book is full of interesting matter. To the general reader it may be of value as characterizing with fidelity some of the tendencies of French thought.

* * * * *

We must not omit mentioning a work published in Germany on the "Literature of the Second Empire since the Coup d'État of the Second of December, 1852."[17 - Études sur la Littérature du Second Empire Français, depuis le Coup d'État du deux Decembre. Par William Reymond. Berlin: A. Charisius. 12mo. pp. 227.] The nature of this sketch could almost be predicated with certainty from the state of feeling towards France in the capital in which it was issued, and the encomiums it received from the Prussian political press. The author, William Reymond, who has proved himself no mean critic in some of his former essays upon the modern productions of France, addresses himself almost exclusively to a German public. His work, as he himself seemed to fear, is not calculated for the taste of Paris, even if it were considered unobjectionable there on the score of the political strictures that are introduced, whether in the discussion of the last play or in the analysis of the last volume of poems.

The truth is, M. Reymond, with much apparent praise, very nearly comes to the conclusion that the second Empire has no literature, and very little philosophy is granted to it in the chapter, "What remains of Philosophy in France." The Novel and the Theatre fare little better at his hands. He has literally made a police investigation of what is most objectionable in French letters, citing now and then some great name, but dwelling with complacency on what is deserving of censure. The influence of France, and of Paris in particular, on the tastes of the Continent, irritates him. He seeks to impress upon his readers the venality of letters and the general debasement of character and of talent that are prevalent in that capital. Such is the spirit of these "Études." The author has, unfortunately, not to seek far for a practical corroboration of his theory, though it is but justice to say that the verses he quotes as characteristic are far from being so. It is to be feared that M. Reymond has rather sought out the blemishes. He has found many, we admit. His readers will thank him for his clever exposition of them, satisfied in many cases to accept the results he presents, without feeling inclined to make such a personal investigation into the lower regions of letters.

* * * * *

"The Political and Literary History of the Press in France,"[18 - Histoire Politique et Littéraire de la Presse en France. Avec une Introduction Historique sur les Origines du Journal et la Bibliographie Générale des Journaux, depuis leur Origine. Par Eugène Hatin. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et De Boise. 8 vols. 12mo.] by Eugene Hatin, is now concluded. As early as 1846, this author published a small work, "Histoire du Journal en France." Since that time he has devoted himself exclusively to the study of French journalism. Though liberal in his views, he is not in favor of unlimited liberty of the press. He believes it to be the interest of society that a curb should be put on its excesses. "What we must hope for is a liberty that may have full power for good, but not for evil."