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rality and purity, and innocence and ingenuousness, and such animating alliterations, floated before me, and, as might be expected, prepared me for an utter disappointment. I had gone to the Champ de Mars, my brain crammed, like a Yorkshire newspaper, with the anticipated joys of horse-racing, and I came away knocked up like a sorry hackthere are various kinds, reader, as the booksellers could tell you. I went to the fête of the Rosière, my head as full as a flower-pot of bloom and fragrance, and I returned with every expectation as withered as the faded wreath that adorns the image of the Virgin over the porch of Suresne's Church. There never were such cruel pains taken by a Curé, with or without the commands of his superiors, to render common-place and unpopular an institution full of sense and sentiment, as have been taken in the present instance by the Curé of Suresne. The fête of la Rosière, established on the basis of national feeling and true morality, was in its origin meant to reward with a garland (full as honourable per se as a blue ribbon) the girl of the village who combined the best life with the most graceful demeanour. To-day the whole matter, if I am rightly informed, (and I beg that this clause may be a saving one,) has become an affair of paltry intrigue and party prejudice. The fortunate maiden last year was the daughter of the Maire! Now, though I would no more exclude the progeny of a Maire from the right to the Rosière any more than the prize of the horse-race, I think the public functionary ought not to have let his daughter enter the lists, lest the people might suppose his situation to have some influence in her success. They think so at Suresne, I can assure him; but the discontent is at its height this summer, from the Curé having refused the claims of all the girls of the village who could be convicted of having gone to a fete or a dance during the year! Imagine this, in France on the banks of the Seine-within sight of Paris! It is the most preposterous innovation of modern epurations, for it strikes at the very root of national manners and character. A French girl entitled to be crowned Rosière in proportion as she is ignorant of "Balancer and Rigadoon!" why it is worthy of John Knox, who did not deal harder with Mary, his gaymannered and French-hearted Queen, than this Curé with his virgin parishioners. There were, as may be supposed, scarcely any candidates, for the favoured maiden, instead of being "one in a hundred," was, of course, only one out of four or five; and these, no doubt, the pious wallflowers of former ball-rooms, who, unable to get a flesh and blood partner in a mortal quadrille, have been forced to waltz through the year with the memory of some dead-and-gone saint of the second century. Mademoiselle Julienne Something-or-other may, therefore, arrange her garland before the looking-glass, without exciting the least envy in the majority of her fellow-villagers.

As for me, I turned from the contemplation of these puny conten tions to the overwhelming enjoyments of "La Saint-Louis." Here, thought I, I shall see something worthy of the genuine fête of religion and royalty combined. Saint Louis and King Louis are to be celebrated together to-day-the throne and the altar-regal splendour with Christian piety-all the national virtues consecrating a few of the national vanities-civility and sobriety walking hand-in-hand with gracefulness and gaiety! That was something like a combination for

an amateur of fêtes ;-so away I trudged in the hot sun of the 25th of August, glowing with expectation, and determined to be pleased :and a dogged fellow he must have been who was not pleased with the sight of the Champs Elysées at noon of that day. Every thing that could give pleasure (to an unthinking people at least) was gathered together. Merry-andrews, mountebanks, rope-dancers, bands of music, games of all kinds, and every kindly gaiety, were collected on the spot. I really wandered through these Elysian fields, something in the mood of the happiest of the shades. A thousand vagaries crossed me at every turn; but that, I think, which caused me to moralize the most, was the poor devils climbing up immensely high poles to come at the reward of their aspirings-a silver watch, a pair of buckles, or some such ornament. It was painfully amusing to see these climbers straining upwards; the earliest cleaning off the greasy unction, with which each pole was larded half-mast high, then slipping down to earth, and followed by others, all with their pockets filled with sand to fling upon the pole above them and give them a chance of clinging to it the better in their ascent. I thought of the strange contrast presented by this road to wealth and fame to all the others in life. Instead of being harsh and rugged, the only fault of this was being too smooth; and the only effort of the adventurers was, not to level obstacles, but to roughen their way to fortune. Here, too, were no sharp turns or short cuts. This was plain, straight-forward, up-pole work; and so far from a needy aspirant being, as in common cases, the most looked down upon, the fellow the most in-kneed, on the present occasion, had the best chance of getting above the world. Then came the associations-those whirlwind disturbers of the nicest train of philosophical speculation. I bethought me of barbers' poles, and the Polish lancers, and the North Pole, and Capt. Parry, and so on-until I was roused by the noise of wheels, and the shouts of the human animals that were dragging along the body of a cart, with a huge empty barrel thereon..

The group that presented itself was frightful. It consisted of a couple of dozen ragged, villain-visaged fellows, with about as many atrocious specimens of female degradation, coming forward towards the place where the wine was to be distributed. It was as if a band of demons had stolen into Paradise. They came on with gestures and exclamations fitting their appearance; brushed through the dancers; broke in upon the sports; and, as if under the special protection of the police, took up a position in front of one of the dépôts of provisions, which were to be immediately scattered gratis to the crowd. As every eye turned on these savages, each tongue exclaimed—“Ah, voila les gens des Faubourgs!" Aha! (said I to myself, like the Lord Chamberlain, in Henry VIIIth.)—

"There's a trim rabble let in! Are all these

Our faithful friends o' the suburbs?"

And I moved forward for the purpose of inspecting this odious deputation from all that is most odious in France. I shall not detail the result of my observations, but merely state, that every stage erected for the distribution was guarded at foot by a band of those miscreants, who are as anxious to wallow in wine to-day, as their fathers (or themselves perhaps) were to bathe in blood this day thirty years. At two o'clock

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the distribution commenced. Bread, meat, sausages, &c. were showered down on the multitude, in a profusion that would have reminded me of the pleasant times when

"Streets were paved with penny rolls,

And houses thatch'd with pancakes ;"

if my memory had not been pre-occupied by painful recollections of a more recent epoch, and all my feelings in revolt against the demoralizing spectacle. But when the edibles were exhausted, and the winegiving began then, indeed, I blushed for the profanation of the day, and the degradation of my species. When I looked on the struggling wretches, raving, raging, and deluged in the flood, rushing forward with pots, kettles, and cans, to catch the streaming liquor, and convey it to the barrels provided by each Faubourg as a common reservoir; while others, the great majority, glutted themselves into instantaneous drunkenness, rolled in the mud, and uttered yells, and songs, and blasphemy-it was then that all my indignation was up,-it was then that I cordially cursed the policy which debases and brutalizes a people, to give their rulers a better chance of crushing them. Then it was, that viewing the national sobriety and decorum violated, as it were, at the foot of the throne and by the royal ordonnance, I marvelled how a king could be honoured, or a saint be glorified, or man be bettered, or Heaven be pleased, by such a scene!

I pondered all this so deeply, walked so fast, and used such energetic action as I inwardly debated, that I saw I had attracted the remarks of some of the agents of that multocular monster-the Police; and fearing to be taken up for a malcontent, I wheeled away through the trees, and took French leave of the place. T. T.

ANSWER TO THE POEM ENTITLED

WHY DO WE LOVE

Which appeared in the 33d Number of the New Monthly Magazine.

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REGINALD DALTON.

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We have already taken occasion* to give vent to a slight movement of impatience at the overwhelming rapidity with which the anonymous author of the, so called, "Scotch novels" proceeds in his literary career—a career, in which the panting reviewer toils after him in vain, and the most voracious glutton of circulating lore that ever 'gave his days and nights" to the Clarindas and Theodosias of the Minerva press, can hardly avoid being distanced. To what extent our readers may have sympathized in this pettishness of our criticism, we know not; for critics are a waspish sort of personages, and when tormented with the necessity of thinking for others, (it is bad enough to be obliged to think for ourselves,) may fall into fits of spleen, unfelt by the happier being whose "gentleness" is not disturbed by such considerations, and who has nothing in life to do with a book but to read it, to consume his aliquot portion of literature with thankfulness, and be satisfied with what is prepared for him. Of this, however, we are more assured, that if the public be ready to take the productions of the "great unknown" from his bookseller's hands as fast as he can bring them into the market, the case is not quite the same with every imitator, whom the speculating activity of the "north countrie" may engender; and we are quite convinced that something more is necessary to the production of a good novel, than the free use of the Scottish dialect, and an assortment of names for places and persons which no mortal man born south of the Tweed can hope to pronounce. We are, indeed, very much mistaken, if the frequent repetition of the mannerisms of even a good model will not affect the popularity of the original, and the "crambe repetita" of parodists and copyists, bring to a premature close a style of composition, which has perhaps contributed more largely to the public stock of innocent amusement, than any other description of fictitious narrative that has yet lent wings to time, or soothed the anguish of suffering or sorrowing humanity.

To this subject we propose very shortly to recur; and for the present we shall confine ourselves more strictly to the work the title of which stands at the head of the present article. Reginald Dalton, we are told in its title-page, is the production of the author of Adam Blair; and we confess ourselves indebted for the information. In no other part of the volumes have we been able to discover the slightest trace of the fact, there being little of that vraisemblance, that Defoeish accuracy of portraiture, and painfully minute delineation of sentiment and situation in the new novel, which characterizes so forcibly its singular predecessor; and we frankly own, that but for the friendly hint in question, with all our critical acumen and lynx-eyed perspicacity, we should never have dreamed of such a thing "in our philosophy."

To complain that the story is totally defective in interest, may be deemed hypercritical; for though the story used to be considered the most important particular in a good novel, now-a-days “on a changé tout ça," and it goes for little or nothing in the affair. Provided an author can muster a few melodramatic situations strongly conceived, and a few picturesque groupings clearly delineated, the vehicle, or to use

* Review of Quentin Durward, page 82.

the apothecary's phrase, the “quivis idoneus vehiculus," in which they are to be gulped down, is a matter of perfect indifference.

This observation equally applies to the characters; if characters they can be called, that character have none. An insipid dawdle of an he roine with nothing indicative of her sex but her petticoat, and a lackadaysical tay-drinking sort of a gentleman, as Paddy happily expresses it, for a hero, are amply sufficient to carry the most rebellious and recalcitrant reader through three goodly volumes of that "pure description," which in these latter times holds the place not only of sense, but of wit, humour, adventure, pathos, and philosophy to boot. The defect of moral interest in the writings of the Scottish novelists, which we have already noticed, in our examination of Quentin Durward, as the result of design rather than of accident, of deliberate volition rather than of defective power, is carried to an extreme in the execution of Reginald Dalton, a work from which it would be difficult to collect that any thing great, or noble, or generous, existed in our common nature. Aristotle, good easy man, was of opinion, that the agents of fictitious narrative should be marked by decided qualities, good or evil; and in admitting the wicked to play a part, he required a certain decency and moral shading which should relieve as far as possible, and give elevation even to the worst. He little imagined the possibility of weaving into a story, with any hope of pleasing, the no-characters of that common-place existence the feelings and motives of which are all grovelling and mean; an existence divested of the energy of passion and the impulse of sentiment, which rarely rises even to the dignity of crime, and is immeasureably removed from the mere apprehension of virtue at least, of virtue in its more exalted and resplendent phases. It cannot but strike the reader as a circumstance sufficiently extraordinary, that the writers of the Scotch Tory school should have so closely adhered to the médiocre in character, as not even to exempt their own countrymen; whom, in defiance of all nationality (that bright feature in the Scottish character) they have represented under the meanest and most selfish traits of low cunning and close prudence, which are said peculiarly to belong to narrow fortunes and narrow educations in the northern part of these dominions.

This defect of character, which, in the writings of the original of the school, is relieved by the merits of the narration, and to which, splendid exceptions must occur to every reader's recollection, is the more conspicuously revealed in the novel now under examination, by the almost total absence of a lively interest in its situations and adventures. So much is this the case, that it is impossible to escape, even for a single page, from the conviction of a malus animus seeking to lull the public to sleep, to wean it from all the finer feelings, and more expansive generalizations of sentiment and of views which encourage a love of freedom and predispose to patriotism. As long as the public taste can be fed with an idle literature, that rouses no emotion, forces no thought, awakens no passion, but, like the drowsy hum of distant waters, stupefies with a continuity of monotonous impressions, corruption is safe from invasion, and the work of national degradation goes on in unobserved security. This truth, if not perceived as a sentiment, is no less

* Poetics.

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