BAD TASTE. The work is composed in the most confused manner, and written in the worst style-if it be not an abuse of language, to call that a style, which is merely a jargon. There is neither order in the subjects nor connexion between the parts. It is a huge aggregation of disjointed sentences so jumbled together, that we seriously assert that no injury will be done to the volume by beginning with the last chapter and reading backwards. to the first; and yet it has all the affectation of order: it is divided into parts, and the parts into books; and each book has a running title, as Society,' Peasantry,' &c. But Lady Morgan has a very convenient way of getting rid of the trammels of order to which a division into parts and books might have subjected her excursive genius-she every here and there breaks off her subject, and interposing a line of asterisks, thus

proceeds to any other topic which occurs to her. In her first book there are no less than sixteen of these gaps, and if there had been a gap wherever there was a breach in the order of narration, or a change of subject, there would have been several hundreds. As to the running titles of her book, these are convertible amongst themselves, and the chapters which are called Peasantry' might be quite as truly denominated Paris,' and vice versa.

Of these statements, we cannot from the nature of the case, lay before our readers such distinct proofs as we shall upon other points. To give them a full idea of the disorder in which Lady Morgan has flung out her observations, our article must have been as long as her volume. Of her bad taste in other respects, instances will be found hereafter, but one is too remarkable not to be here especially quoted. Lady Morgan despises Racine; to be sure, he was guilty in her eyes, of the atrocious offence of piety; and for this she rather more than sufficiently sneers at his imbecility.

'Dieu m'a fait la grâce, (says the feeble Racine to Madam de Maintenon,) en quelque compagnie que je me suis trouvé, de ne jamais rougir de l'évangile ni du roi.' Racine, who associates the king and the Gospel so intimately in his familiar letters, talks in his work on the Port-Royal of the great designs of God on the mére Agnès, (one of the founders of that religious community,) such was the intellectual calibre of the author of Phédra.' (Phèdre.)—Part i. 48.

But her rage against his memory is carried so far that, in defiance of the unanimous voice of France, and the assent of all Europe, and in contempt of a century of fame, she (Lady Morgan, who does not understand his language, and cannot write correctly the name of his best known tragedy) has the wonderful audacity to pronounce him no poet!-ii. 95, 98.

BOMBAST and NONSENSE.-This also would be a very long chapter if we were to do full justice to our subject, but we shall only select a specimen or two.

-A clock gives rise to the following observations.

"To count time by its artificial divisions, is the resource of inanity! The unoccupied ignorance of the very lowly, and the inevitable ennui of the very elevated, alike find their account in consultations with a timepiece. It is in the hour-glass of energy and of occupation, that the sand is always found lying neglected at the bottom.'-i, p. 37.

-Some profound remarks on national character are introduced in this simple, elegant, and intelligible manner.

'National idiosyncrasy must always receive its first colouring from the influence of soil and of climate; and the moral characteristics of every people be resolvable into the peculiar constitution of their physical structure. Religion and government, indeed, give a powerful direction to the principles and modes of civilized society, and debase or elevate its inherent qualities, by the excellence or defect of their own institutes. But the complexional features of the race remain fixed and unchanged, the original impression of nature is never effaced.'-i. p. 85.

-The following pathetic exclamation breaks forth at the sight of some tulips growing at a cottage door in France.

'Oh! (these groans are very frequent with lady Morgan) 'Oh! when shall I behold near the peasant's hovel in my own country, (Ireland,) other flowers than the bearded thistle, which there waves its lonely head and scatters its down upon every passing blast, or the scentless shamrock, the unprofitable blossom of the soil, which creeps to be trodden upon, and is gathered only to be plunged in the inebriating draught, commemorating annually the fatal illusions of the people, and drowning in the same tide of madness their emblems and their wrongs.'-i. 29.

We do not pretend to guess what this passage can mean; but we will readily pay lady Morgan the compliment of saying that the flowers of her eloqunce are just such flowers as the thistle and shamrock.

-Having a note to write in French she consults her footman, and, in return for his assistance, she compliments him with the title of an illiterate literatus, (p. 207.) an expression which we the more readily adopt into our language, as it seems to afford a generic name for the very class of writers to which lady Morgan belongs; we really know not how we could better express her merits than by calling her an illiterate leterata.

-Lady Morgan thinks the period at which she visited Paris was very favourable for observation

"The agitated surface, still heaving with recent commotion, was strewn with the relics of remote time thrown up from the bosom of oblivion.'— p. 109.

-Diderot has said, foolishly enough, that to paint a woman, you should dip your pen in the hues of the rainbow, and dry the writing with the dust of butterflies' wings-lady Morgan contrives to turn the silly hyperbole into still ranker nonsense.

To paint the character of a woman,' says Diderot, 'you must use the feather of a butterfly's wing.'-i. 163.

BLUNDERS. This is also a plentiful crop-we shall only amuse our readers with some samples of the article, which savour very strongly, not of French, but Hibernian origin.

-During a royal visit to the theatre, at which lady Morgan was present, she was afflicted with such a squint in her mind's eye as

to see

That the king and royal family occupied a centre box on one side.'➡ ii. p. 134.

-In her admiration of general La Fayette, she intends to dignify him with the title of patriarch, but by an unhappy ignorance of her own language, contrives to make the general's children and grand-children the patriarchs.

We found general La Fayette surrounded by his patriarchal family, his son and daughter-in-law, his two daughters and their husbands, and eleven grand children.'-ii. p. 183.

-But this is not quite so extraordinary as the fact which she has discovered, that, in the families of the emigrant nobility, the children are all the same age, or nearly so, with their own parents; the old emigrant nobility, and their scarcely younger offspring.' (i. 113.) After this sensible exordium, she goes on to pour out a torrent of falsehood and jacobinism upon that prejudiced,' 'ignorant,' ' selfish,' ' bloody' and 'revengeful faction,' the royalists of France. Although it does not belong to this part of the subject, we cannot refrain from asking lady Morgan to instance one drop of blood shed by the emigrants since the restoration.

-The rights attached in most other countries to primogeniture, have been abolished in France. This fact lady Morgan pleasantly blunders into the abolition of a practice which, except in the case of twins, has obtained in all countries since the world began.

'There is no primogeniture in France!'—i. 22.

-In the same blundering way she transforms the 'Palais du sénat conservateur,' into the Palais conservateur,' (ii. 34.) a title which all the directories, councils and senates which have in turn inhabited it, regret that it so little deserves.

-The king's surgeon; because he was one of the frères de la Charité, she mistakes for the king's confessor, and on this low and stupid blunder of her own, insults Louis XVIII, and builds a comparison between the spiritual influence of the former and that of the Père de la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV.-ii. 131. -Milton sings of towers and battlements,

Where perhaps some beauty lies

The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.

-Our learned lady believes that the place and not the beauty is the cynosure, and informs us that the court of the grand monarch Was the fatal cynosure of the women of France.-i. 160.

-In the dispute between the real and pseudo Amphitryons in Molière's play, one of them, to establish his identity, appeals to the

company whether he had not invited them to dinner; upon which Sosia, in pleasant ridicule of the way in which parasites decide in doubtful cases, says

'Le véritable Amphitryon

Est celui chez qui l'on dîne.'

This, lady Morgan had heard, we presume, applied with pleasantry and success; and resolved to make the most of so good a joke, although she does not see where it lies, she quotes the words in a dozen different places, and in every one of them with about as much success as he of whom Joe Miller relates that he let fall a shoulder of mutton and then begged pardon for a lapsus lingua. Cider is not held in any estimation by the véritables amphitryons of rural savoir vivre.'—i. 71.

'The countess De Hossonville (who had invited Lady Morgan to breakfast) was the véritable amphitryon of this delightful day.'-i. 229. The other instances are equally pointless and absurd.

IGNORANCE OF FRENCH LANGUAGE and MANNERS-The allegation that, the manuscript was illegible and the long list of errata prefixed to the work, induced us to impute to mistake a thousand instances which we might otherwise have introduced under this head; but enough remains to show, that of the manners of France, ancient or modern, and of the language, with which she so affectedly, et usque ad nauseam,-interlards her pages, she is more ingnorant than a boarding-school girl.

-She describes the cottages in Normandy as

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Deeply buried in their BOQUETS d'arbres or knots of fruit and forest trees.'-i. p. 35.

If it were not for lady Morgan's own officious translation we should have thought bouquet, nosegay, a mere error of the press for bosquet, a grove or tuft of trees; but with the assistance of the translation, it becomes evident that lady Morgan found the word bosquet in her notes, and not remembering what it meant she turned it into bouquets: but on consideration, not very well understanding what a boquet d'arbres could mean, she recollects that bouquet is a knot of flowers, and that it may therefore also be a knot of oaks.

-The word 'Menin,' the name of some young officers who attend the dauphin of France, lady Morgan translates the minions of the dauphin, (i. p. 99). We could not guess where she found this strange mistranslation, but happening to look into Boyer's School Dictionary, we there found menin, minion:' how it got there we cannot tell, but if lady Morgan knew any thing of the French language or French history, she would have known that the English minion comes from the French mignon, and that this name, in its peculiar, offensive meaning, was applied to Joyeuse, d'Espernon, &c., well known as the minions of Henry the Third.'

In speaking of Bonaparte, lady Morgan says He was quite a different personage to the few who had les petites entrées, and

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the many who had ONLY les grandes.'—i. p. 213.—The fact is itself false-and a story which lady Morgan builds on it, is miserably silly; but we only quote the passage as a proof of her ignorance of the French language and manners. Deceived by the term petites, which seems to apply itself to the few, as grandes to the many, she reverses the true meaning of the words. The ordinary reception at court which is given to every body is called les petites entrées the more intimate admission into the royal society is called les grandes entrées. This blunder is not a mere slip of the pen, for lady Morgan repeats it in more than one place; and we notice it the rather, because, ignorant as it proves her to be of the very terms which were used in the old court of France, she on all occasions affects to be a nice critic in its etiquettes, and a severe censurer of its manners.

-We shall presently see how she can bungle a Greek name into something which is both Latin and French, and yet neither,The whole Egean family is fatal to poor lady Morgan.-She assures us that she saw with her own eyes Gerin's (she means Guerin's) picture of Phædra and Hyppolita. She may have seen a picture; but she certainly could not have understood it, nor even have read Racine's play, from which it is taken.-The fact we take to be, that this learned lady's knowledge of the history of Theseus has been supplied by the Midsummer Night's Dream, in which there happens to be no Hypolites, and to be an Hypolita. -Of the Place du Carrousel she says,

'In 1622 Louis XIV. gave here his famous fête to Mad. La Valliére, and strove to win her heart by flying Turks, whose sorties from the angles of the court, are said to have given it its present name, by a forced etymology of Quarré-aux-ailes, originating the modern appellation of Carrousel.-ii. 24.

Here is a delightful bunch of blunders. The Carrousel is not a modern appellation-it was not first called by that name in the time of Louis XIV. It is derived, not from Quarré-aux-ailes, but from Carouse, Carousel, meaning in old French, as in old English, feast, festivity; and Louis XIV was not born for nearly twenty years after lady Morgan describes him as a flying Turk.Some French wag, seeing her taking notes, must have imposed this story on her simplicity.

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-Lady Morgan is mighty familiar with the princesses, dutchesses, countesses, &c. &c. of France, and intimates pretty roundly that her own personal talents and celebrity' obtained her admission into French society to which few, if any other foreigners were received.-i. 241, 242. Yet there is hardly one of those dear,' beautiful,' gracious,' and witty' friends, (for this is the coin in which she repays her entertainers,) whose name she can spell; and though she talks as familiarly of these Parisian lions

As maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs,'

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