condemnatory, justice compels him to add: | tion of function scarcely human. A notable "There are eloquence, pathos, and fancy; cha- instance of recent occurrence is the detail in a racters of high endowment and noble aspirations; novel of an amour between two famous littérascenes of exquisite tenderness and chaste affec- teurs, which ended in a quarrel and separation : tion: pictures of saintly purity, heroic daring, first, the narrative and analysis of the fair and martyr-like devotion." object; then the other side of the story from one of the lover's kindred; and at last, a third exposition from a female admirer of the departed poet. No where but in Paris could such a literary experiment, such a sentimental postmortem occur, with the clearness, the candour, and the plausibility, but above all the abandon, which these three novels of real life exhibit for the sneers or the sympathy of a curious public. One of their most popular bards advocated, through a long career, in eloquent songs, the theory that Le bonheur tient au savoir-vivre; and one would infer from the freedom with which all that is sacred in life and the heart, is discussed, revealed and analyzed, that there was no under-current to the solemn tide of "the vast inland sea that brought us hither." The external philosophy is complete; the niceties of observation and of arrangement, as far as material things are concerned, is marvellous; delicacy of perception abounds; delicacy of feeling is in the inverse ratio thereto. Such is the violent contrast which the written delineation of human life in France offers, and it extends to actual experience and to real character. Analysis there is, often irreverent though scientific; sentiment, morbid; art, meretricious; and the wonder and peculiarity is, that these patent and vital defects can coexist with so much that is instinct with genius, insight and beauty, which, in our vernacular tongue, are embodied intact and "unmixed with baser matter." If an English or German writer is natural, he is not theatrical; if he is pure, he is not tainted; if simple, he is not meretricious; such diversities are represented by classes not blended in individuals, either in life or authorship. Akin to this inconsistency in fiction, is the coincident prevalence of libertinism and domestic affection in France; as a country, she is no less famous for gallantry than for filial devotion; the latter sentiment is a national trait. What Lady Morgan observed in Lafayette's household, fifty years ago, has struck habitués of French circles and readers of French memoirs, always. "They" (she wrote of the children at Lagrange)" are so polite and affectionate, and so unlike English children, that I am convinced the French character is more physically amiable than ours." Nor is this winsome trait observable only in family life: it pervades the middle class, cheers student exiles, and makes cheerful many a heterogeneous and accidental household colony. Nothing strikes an American more forcibly than, after years of sojourn in a busy, eventful city of his native land, where houses are demolished and people scattered every month, to find, on returning to Paris, the same faces round the table d'hôte of his old pension, and the same hearty greeting and amiable sympathy that made him at home there when a youth attending lectures at the Sorbonne or Hotel Dieu. In violent contrast with the essential humanity of this cultivation of the affections, whereof the casual relations of life so aptly avail themselves in Paris, is the utter absence of delicacy in the literary, artistic and social use made of experience in relations of sentiment or passion. An instinctive reserve, if it does consecrate, at least decently sequesters, these private and often profound episodes in the life of a German or AngloSaxon; and when they are reproduced by genius or in conversation, it is under a disguise which conceals the individual; but capital is made out of love and liaisons in Paris as babitually as by the rat-hunters in the drains and the chiffonier in the gutter; and that with a sang-froid and apparent unconsciousness of indelicacy which marks emphatically the difference between the intellect and the soul, the intelligent and the emotional, and shows how in the Gallic nature they are consciously distinct and capable, as it were, of an altera The spectacle of life is no where else so comprehended, so significant, so essential; while the ideas, aims and sentiment that underlie and are supposed to be demonstrated by it, are crude, capricious, unreal. It has been truly said that the sympathies of the French with the American Revolution " sprang more from a sentimental feeling than from a political understanding of the necessity and merits of the case." A care-. ful reader of the letters and life of Franklin will perceive that his success at the French Court, in his own and his country's behalf, was mainly owing to the shrewd use he made of what Byron calls "entusymuzy," and that other normal element of success in Paris, la mode. While in no civilized land are the distinctions of rank, circumstances and vocation more obvious both in nomenclature, costume, manners and the phrases in vogue; in none are they all so liable to be fused by an identical impulse, merged in a common idea. In Napoleon the First's day-at the crisis of his success-boys and women were as demonstrative for military glory as soldiers and generals. Each class, partly from an extreme social temperament, and partly from the effect of organization and centralization, whereby the economy of private and the administration of public life intimately act and react on each other, are found to partake of the enthusiasm, or the event of the hour, in a manner and to a degree never realized among more phlegmatic and less disciplined people. But if this is the result of a combination of intelligences warmed and moulded by capricious or intense sympathies and objects in the capital; the same mercurial natures when isolated, subjected to routine, kept apart from great interests, by the very lack of high individuality and deep resources, become singularly narrow, dependent and monotonous. Social life in the Province, therefore, offers the same extreme contrast to that of England, Germany, or the United States as the metropolitan if the one is the excess of superficial brilliancy, the other is no less the excess of prejudice and pettiness. Another striking evidence of the dramatic, the unreal in conviction and expression as a social characteristic in France, is the incessant sacrifice of substance to shadow, of things to ideas, and of ideas to words; so that thoughtful observers can scarcely credit their senses when the Gallic mind or conduct is apparently in earnest. The excitement, the profession, the demonstration seem to answer all the purpose of the faith, object, fact; it is the exercise rather than the realization of a sentiment; the pursuit rather than the achievement; the "show of things" rather than the "desire of the soul," to conform which two is, on the contrary, the desideratum of the Anglo-Saxon nature. Thus concentrated politically and dependent socially, is it difficult to trace directly to life in Paris the great facts of French history as inevitable fruits of national character: such, for instance, as the single one stated by a late writer, that the French, with an army vastly more numerous than the English, is comparatively destitute of colonies." And do not the same facts explain the prevalence in the French capital of that peculiar kind of life called Bohemian ? So many resources and conveniences brought together and made available, with the absence of strong domestic proclivities and social reserve, not only invite but confirm that living for self and the immediate; that facile alternation from study to pleasure-that repudiation of permanent ties, that trusting to chance for diversion, knowledge, companionship, love, the gay, egotistical, urbane, sometimes fasting and sometimes féted, sometimes ambitious and sometimes indulgent, but always improvised existence-halfartist, half-scholar, and wholly man and woman "of-the-world" experience, which has been so well sung by a bard of this nomadic citizenship: "There stands behind St. Geneviève, A city where no fancy paves With gold and narrow streets, But jovial Youth, the landlady, On gloomy stairs, in attic high, Gay Hope, her tenant, meets. "There Love and Labour, hand in haud, Create a modest fairy-land, And pleasures rarely pall; Each chamber has its own romance, And young ambition's frenzies dance Along the plastered wall. "Enchanted cells of solid stone, Where hermit never lives alone, Or beats the moody breast; Where each one shares his bed and board, MISTRESSES AND MA I D S. (A Matrimonial Dialogue). Kate. I really have no patience with our careless housemaid, Dinah, There's not a day, a single day, but she's at war with china; Smash went the lunch-tray-everything to atoms smash'd-this morning, If this continues, I must give the tiresome creature warning; We shall not have a glass, or piece of earthenware uncrack'd Indeed, we shall be ruined, Charles, we shall, and that's the fact. Charles. Dear Kate, don't let that little tongue of yours become unruly, We'll talk this matter over, love, but let us take it coolly. K. Coolly! indeed-dear Charles, I see, you talk like all you men― I might, p'rhaps, if this sort of thing but happen'd now-and-then ; But as it happens every day, such defensiveWhy, if she served for nothing, then expensive: conduct's not she'd even be Last week, from pettishness, I think-for Dinah has her pets She broke a china dish, and spoilt our best of dinnersets Talk coolly of such losses! Charles, and be like you, phlegmatic! No-when I'm vex'd, as I am now, my words must be emphatic. C. It is annoying, and I own you've reason to complain, But grumbling won't set humpty-dumpty on his legs again; Be mistress of yourself, my Kate, yes, e'en "though china fall" These breakages are accidents-they must be, after all; And accidents will happen, Kate, no matter whence their source, In the best regulated family, and ours is that, of course. K. Despite your vulgar proverbs, Charles, my anger is no less, Because I'm sure these breakages all come through carelessness; I shall persist in calling things by their right names I say This carelessness of Dinah's is repeated day-by-day : I wish some person would invent a kind of apparatus To supersede all servants-how the blessing would elate us! I do declare most seriously that since I've been a wife, They've been the greatest plague, in fact, the misery of my life. C. I see, my dear, just what you want, a kind of dumb waitress An excellent idea it is-ma petite chère maitresse— It would not smash your crockeryware, and would, too, be unable To give pert answers if you were at times-unreasonable. K. Unreasonable! Charles, do I break glass, or every day smash china? Of course I don't, and if I don't, I ask you why should Dinah ? C. I'll tell you why-your parlour-maid has more, far more to do With china, glass, and crockeryware-things apt to break-than you; She, from and to the kitchen has to bring, and then retake them, Which, as you never, never do, how can you ever break them? Three-hundred, yes, and sixty-five, her chances are each year, Whereas, your own are none at all-you will admit that, dear: And so to make comparison between your maid and you Is, I repeat, unreasonable-that epithet is trueAnd if the term does not apply to you, and to your railings, It is because we all are blind to our own little failings. K. So, I must never blame my maid for doing her work ill Unless I do her work, myself-that's what you would instil; If it be true, girls never ought to be reproved at all, And this, my dear, I simply phrase, downright nonsensical. C. Not quite so fast-I never said, unfair interpreter, That when a servant does do ill, you're not to censure her; I only meant to say it shows in you great fallibility To measure in the way you did a servant's culpability; Even in such a trivial case as Dinah's late mischance, Your judgment should control your tongue-weigh every circumstance: In drawing your late parallel you set this rule at nought, Because by your comparison you most unjustly sought To magnify your servant's blame-for, as I think I've K. A Daniel come to judgment ! I declare I shall be bound Henceforth to call you Solomon, your judgment's so profound. C. Well, you may laugh, Kate, as you please, my judgment, too, deride, Depend upon it, all the blame is not on Dinah's side; Who should the more forbearance show, the educated grade, Or-as perhaps you'll say she should-the uneducated maid? Go where we will, we hear complaints in these complaining days, Of servants' foibles, petty faults, and their degenerate As, if this class in moral worth had sunk extremely low, While all their betters have improved, or kept in statu quo: Now, all experience tells us, Kate, that when two parties pother, It's half-a-dozen on one side, and just six on the other : I think a reformation should from mistresses beginThat they should cease a trifling flaw to deem a heinous sin: That they should due allowance make, and show consideration For their domestics' trials, and their daily provocation, Their want of proper training, and their lack of education : They're lectured now for trivial faults, and in no kindly tone, In fact, to some poor servant-girls a kind word is unknown : The part they have to play in life is difficult, indeed, And tho' sometimes they may be plagues" they're often friends in need. K. But surely when a girl persists with Dinah's pertinacity In breaking all she touches, Charles, 'tis no undue loquacity If I reprove her for her acts, or, is my censure wrong? And should an educated mistress in such case hold her tongue? C. Of course you will be justified in taking her to task, But do it without anger, Kate, and that is all I ask; Remember, too, this simple fact, that Dinah's carelessness Is not more culpable in her than e'en in a Princess; And think how you yourself would feel if angrily attack'd For every little thoughtless word, or every careless act; Of her position and your own let blame be irrespective, And do not pour on Dinah's head a torrent of invective. K. I'm not accustomed, Charles, to pour, as you've politely said A torrent of invective on a careless servant's head- this morning, And I suppose the end will be the girl will give me warning. C. Now tell me why you think your maid will give her mistress warning, If she but mildly names to her the breakage of this morning? Your parlour-maid appears to be--to give her her desert A very civil girl indeed, the opposite of pert. K. O, yes, she's civil, and all that, her temper's not amiss, Her carelessness is her great fault-a dreadful one it is But, then, the foolish creature wants to better-as they say Herself, improve, herself she can, and possibly she ( They C. leave you! O, indeed they are a plague to man and wife. Again, your censure is unjust, I cannot let it pass Pray, why should you apply to them, the uneducated class, A test of human excellence which you would never dream Of meting out to your own self? dear Kate, you'd surely deem Your husband was, what he would be, a most egregious ninny, To take a half-a-guinea fee if he could get a guinea; Then why blame Dinah if she strives to get her wages raised From eight to fourteen pounds? poor girl, I think she's to be praised. K. My wages, Charles, are more than eight in fact, they're nine pounds clear, Including all et cæteras they're quite nine pounds a year; But Dinah and her class forget their catechisms or To masters it applies as well, and, yes, to mistresses; If we expound so lib'rally our duty to our neighboar, Let us in fairness do the same to those who for us labour; Methinks, the catechism, Kate, was really meant to show us We should with justness act to all, yes, e'en to those below us: And Kate you are ambitious, too, a woman of such pith, You want to cut out her you call "that vulgar Mrs. Smith" Did you not hope the other day-I hope the same my dear Into poor Dinah's simple head what foolishness has To which I trace the censure of our servants' little crept! flaws; We judge the acts of our own class with nice discri- | As for myself, I must confess, I have no wish to see mination, Whereas, our judgment's most unjust to those in Dinah's station; In me, a wish to rise in life is laudable and good, I'm not unjust, I'm sure I'm not-though this you seem to doubt; Say what you will, though daily vex'd, from scolding I refrain, But one must be an angel if one never did complain. C. I don't deny your temper's tried when servants are unruly, But what I do complain of is you don't take such things coolly, Which if you bore in mind this fact you certainly would do That servants have their tempers tried more often, far, than you. K. Am I illtemper'd do you mean? Is scolding my delight? Really, if you mean what you hint, I can't think you polite ! C. O, not at all, Kate, not at all, it would be "petty treason," A little hasty, nothing more-not always ruled by reason: Your temper seem'd at fever heat when lately you attack'd your Maid, who caused the lunch-tray smash, that comminuted fracture; If in this matter our sex ne'er to yours told facts, forsooth, Your sex would seldom hear the words of reason or of truth; When ladies in snug coteries together congregate, The error which I now condemn, you know they ventilate : Ladies will gossip, won't they Kate? they've little else to do, And so they're apt to say harsh things of friends and servants too: There's Mrs. Jones the Vicar's wife, with pharisaic tone, Who everybody's business minds-I wish she'd mind her own. And then there's Mrs. Robinson, and caustic Mrs. Brown, And Mrs. Smith-your friend, my dear-the quidnunc of the town, They satirize, they scandalize-these words are apt as true, That "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do !" Your maids will owe me gratitude if, your ideas retracting, I can convince you of this fact that you are too exacting. K. Exacting, Charles! expect too much! reflect, my dear, reflect, A thoroughly good servant-maid all mistresses expect. C. But servants might retort and say, that all we do insist is, Or, rather, all we want is this—a thoroughly good mistress : Each wants what she considers, Kate, perfection-I'm afraid There's no such specimen on earth, in mistress or in maid: Our servants moral monsters of perfectibility, would be. You'd change them quite as often as you change your maids, my dear. Few of your friends would come out pure-not even the most real, From snch a fiery furnace-test as that of your ordeal; And if in friends those qualities you ne'er or rarely find, Why, in one servant should you think such virtues all combined? K. Would you not like a servant, pray, both steady and industrious, Obliging, civil, honest, too, one strictly true and just to us? I know you would-I'm sure you would-then, why make such objection If I attempt to meet with one approaching to perfection? When writing for her character what is it that I say? What are the questions stereotyped, all ladies ask, I pray? "Is Mary steady, sober, clean, both civil and obliging, Industrious, strictly honest, too, and all that sort of thing ?" C. But, KateK. Don't interrupt me, Charles, but tell me, if you please, If you would wish for qualities the opposite of these? If not, why should you censure me, as I before have said, For wishing, what I hope to find, a thoroughly good maid ? C. I do not censure your attempt to find as many, |