turn over their well filled and yet well printed pages—a manual exercise to which we find ourselves perpetually having recourse, so valuable is the work as a book of reference-we meet with some excellent articles which at once mark the high standard of the publication. Such, for example (taking them at random), are the biographies of Goethe and Gregory VII., by MM. St. René Taillandier and Amédée Renée respectively; of Gouvion-St. Cyr, by M. de Barante; of Goldoni and Gower, by Alexander Pey; and of Grattan, by M. Leo Joubert. The writers, it will be seen, are all of them men who hold a very high place in the literature of France. One great advantage of this Biographie Générale is that it takes in contemporary and living persons. We turn with some interest, for example, to the name of Granier de Cassagnac; and when we find him blaturating from week to week, with a ludicrous mixture of cant and pomposity, in the columns of his new journal, Le Réveil, we can scarcely forbear a smile when we compare the present tone of this imperial hack with the infamous antecedents recounted of him by M. Louvet. We must not pass over, without a word of commendation, the very erudite articles by M. Aubé on the two Gregories, scilicet of Nazianzen, and of Nyssa, any more than those on Grævius and Grotius, by M. Ernest Gregoire. We are glad to find that all the articles on the schoolmen, as far, at least, as our survey has reached, are from the pen of M. Hauréau, whose history of scholastic philosophy carried off the institute prize a few years ago. The two gems of the twenty-second volume are the article on Guizot by M. Lerminier, who must be thoroughly well up in his subject, and the long and elaborate étude on Gutenberg from the pen of M. Ambroise-Firmin Didot. On a former occasion we pointed out the valuable contribution to the history of typography which the same author had made by his articles on the Estiennes; still higher praise, however, is due to that on Gutenberg, just in proportion as the subject was involved in greater obscurity. That

obscurity no living writer was so well qualified to dispel as M. A.-F. Didot; and if he has not altogether succeeded, it may be safely asserted that his conscientious investigations, backed by all the professional knowledge which he is able to bring to their aid, have placed very many matters in a new light, and refuted objections to Gutenberg's which by many were deemed unanswerable. The first name we happen to stumble on in opening the last of the three volumes before us is that of Gaspard Hauser, the mysterious foundling of Nuremberg, as he was called, who was murdered at Anspach, in 1833, and whose history is to this day enveloped in the most impenetrable darkness, in spite of the most active researches of the police. "L'enigme de cette vie attend encore une solution." At the end of the article nearly twenty publications are quoted concerning him; for it should be stated that one of the best features of this Biographical Dictionary is the richness of the "indication des sources à consulter." Among other remarkable articles in this volume we may mention those on Harvey by the editor, Dr. Höefer; on Hegel, by Wilm, the French historian of German Philosophy, and on the President Henaut, by L. Louvet. To show how the notices are brought down to the most recent times, we may mention the sketch of Sir Henry Havelock. It is a mystery to us how these volumes, of nearly a thousand columns each (for every column is numbered) can be sold at such a ludicrously low price as three francs ten sous apiece. It is true that the price will be doubled as soon as the work is completed.

Among the books of the day and of the hour, as connected with Indian insurrections and African expeditions, may be mentioned two works, by M. de Lanoye, entitled L'Inde Contemporaine and Le Niger, respectively. The first is a second edition of a work which had already met with considerable success, and which is now supplemented with a narrative of the revolt, written in a fair enough spirit, considering that the author is a Frenchman. M. de Lanoye gives a

very entertaining account of men and manners in India, as gathered both from the best written sources and from the personal experience of a voyage in India in 1852. In the early part of the volume, we have a delicious story of a Frenchman who played the Grand Seigneur and what is more, played it with eminent success-on board the steamer from Suez, on his way to India; talked very big about London routes and parties; dropped out hints about Lord Dalhousie waiting for him at Calcutta, became the pet of his lady fellowpassengers, the chum of Lord H(as M. de Lanoye styles him), recently appointed Governor of Madras, and who eventually proved to be Lord Dalhousie's cook! From the way he discussed politics and panatellas, every one thought him the crême de la crême of Parisian grandees. The Niger is a very industriously compiled account of all the African expeditions which have taken place from the foundation of the African Society to the most recent times, exclusive of Livingstone, a translation of whose work is, we believe, in course of publication by MM. Hachette, so that M. de Lanoye will serve as a kind of vestibule or vorstudium. He passes in succession from Mungo Park to Denham, Oudney, Clapperton, Lander, Richardson, Overweg, and Barth. We imagine that any one who wishes to make himself master of the progress of geographical discovery in Africa will, with difficulty, meet with any other work which contains such a mass of well condensed materials ready to his hand. M. de Lanoye is not slow to admit the noble part of protagonist which England has played in advancing the cause of freedom and civilization on the banks of the Niger.

V. That lying jade, Rumour, relates that at the beginning of the present century, a certain tutor of Christ's College, Cambridge, shut up his books with a bang at the close of a lecture, and exclaimed to his aston

ished pupils, "Now, my lads, who's for Newmarket!" It is with a somewhat similar feeling of relief from the tension to which the four first sections of our Foreign Courier always subjects us that we approach the concluding department of BellesLettres. The reader little knows what we have to go through for his instruction and entertainment, and perhaps miss the mark after all. We are perfect martyrs, and, what is worse, vide Chomel, dyspeptic martyrs; for if there be one thing more than another calculated to generate dyspepsia, it is the task, experto credite, of extracting from a score of works, and perhaps threescore volumes, the pith and marrow, or as Rabelais styles it, "par curieuse leçon et méditation frequente, rompre l'os et sugeer la substantifique moelle,' which is precisely the process we have to put into execution every time we indite our Foreign Courier. If the reader think it a small thing to be done off-hand between breakfast and luncheon, we only recommend him to try. It is not till we get to the " light literature" department that we feel thoroughly at our ease like Mr. Tutor aforesaid and his pupils scampering to Newmarket.

As poetry, Plato tells us, is a light and winged thing, we think we cannot better indulge our present vein than by dipping into one or two volumes of poetic effusions by way of dessert after the "pièces de résistance" we have been trying to digest. First, then, let us take up the Fleurs de l'Inde,t a collection of Hindoo poems. It was a good idea of the anonymous editor (whom we conjecture to be M. Soupé) to publish the text along with his admirable translations into French and Latin; but we are scarcely prepared to approve of the policy of printing that text in European, instead of Sanscrit characters. These are so easily mastered with a moderate amount of attention and application, as the editor himself admits,

that it was almost to sacrifice to the fear of alarming his readers the real good which might ensue from inducing them manfully to face difficulties which would vanish before a bold front. It is true that he prefaces the text with an able analysis of the Sanscrit alphabet. But we doubt whether he will find many students who will be at the trouble of putting back the European characters into Sanscrit. If he really wished to facilitate what he calls the lecture matérielle, he ought to have printed the Europeanised text interlinear with the Sanscrit, or have thrown it into a foot-note, as Bopp has done in the Sprachprobe, at the end of his smaller Sanscrit grammar. We would not, however, be understood to speak in a censorious tone of so laudable an effort to propagate a taste for Sanscrit literature, a subject which to all Englishmen must be one of especial interest. We hold it to be a scandalous shame that in the Indian civil service examinations the same number of marks is assigned to Sanscrit as to French! Risum teneatis!! The editor of the Fleurs de l'Inde has made a wise selection in choosing for this principal "flower" of his anthology the glorious episode of the death of Yaznadati, in Valmiki's great epic. The translations are admirably executed, the notes are of invaluable assistance, and the appeal at the close of the volume on the expediency of encouraging the study of Sanscrit literature is one to which we cordially respond.

M. Autran's Millianah* is a noble poem. Some of our readers who are not well versed in the Fasti of the French army, may need to be told that the blockade of Millianah, a small town on the slope of the Zaccar, about sixty miles from Algiers, was one of the most memorable and most tragic episodes in the Algierian campaigns. Never has army been subject to greater privations, or honoured by greater fortitude, than the gallant force which held out, under Colonel Illens, against the

assaults of Abd-el-Kader, from June to November, 1840, when Changarnier came to their relief. It is this episode which M. Autran, one of the foremost of modern French poets, has undertaken to commemorate in the little volume before us. It is divided into four cantos, entitled respectively-1, Les travaux; 2, Les douleurs; 3, Les Angoisses; 4, Les Morts. The rising tide of horrors which follow in the wake of famine, disease, and death, is painted with a power which does M. Autran the highest credit. We confess our sympathy with his poem is indebted for much of its ardour to the somewhat analogous scenes through which our own heroic countrymen have passed in what we must persist in calling, in spite of the Gazette de France, our Indian empire. Let us trust that some English Autran may arise to immortalize the memory of a Lawrence, an Inglis, and a Havelock, in verse as noble as that which is here offered up to the heroes of Millianah.

To the two volumes of Thèses de Grammaire, and Thèses de Littérature, already published, M. Jullien has added a third, entitled Thèses de Critique et Poesies,† to which we give a hearty welcome, so far at least as the first half of the volume is concerned, for, to be honest, of the Poesies we have not read a line. M. Jullien is an exceedingly entertaining and "spirituel" critic, notwithstanding the somewhat pedantic tone in which his criticisms are touched. His reading is so extensive, that on every subject he handles he is able to bring to his aid a fund of illustrative matter, which gives great zest to his pages. His "coup d'oeil" on the history and rules of literary criticism contains some admirable suggestions, which we recommended to the notice of men of the craft. In the second Thèse, on "The Conditions of Poetry," he handles with great but not unmerited severity the leading poets, the Lamartines and Victor Hugos of the day, for bad grammar, loose metaphor, and lame comparisons. As a specimen, we

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extract a short passage on the following verses of Victor Hugo in the Orientales:

"Mais surtout quand la brise Me touche en voltigeant, La nuit j'aime être assise, Etre assise en songeant; L'œil sur la mer profonde, Tandis que pâle et blonde, La lune ouvre dans l'onde Son eventail d'argent."

Whereupon M. Jullien makes the following remarks:-"Que de fautes dans ses vers! La brise ne touche, pas et surtout ne voltige, pas. J'aime être assise et pour j'aime à être assise que demande la grammaire. On dit avec raison que la lune est pâle: on ne peut pas dire qu'elle est blonde. Enfin l'éventail d'argent ne signifie rien ou les mots n'out aucun sens, ou l'éventail ouvert veut dire que la clarté de la lune reflêchie par l'eau de la mer a une forme serublable à celle d'un V., d'un triangle, d'un secteur circulaire et c'est impossible. M. Victor Hugo n'a peutêtre j'amais vu un reflet de lune ni sur un bassin, ni sur une rivière, ni sur la mer. Alors pourquoi en parle-t-il?" Perhaps the reader may think some of these remarks are hypercritical. Possibly; but they are humorous and amusing. To turn to some criticism of a higher order, we take up a volume* by the young French Hegelian, M. Taine, full of some admirable and ingenious reflections, in a series of articles on Macaulay, Flêchier, Dickens, Guizot, Thackeray, "Young Athens," as pourtrayed in Plato, Saint-Simon, Madame la Fayette, Michelet, and Montalembert plus Troplong. At the tail of our Foreign Courier our limits will not permit us to examine this volume with the attention due to its very remarkable merits. We can only state that M. Taine is one of the most rising writers and most original critics of whom France can boast. The series of articles he has recently been publishing in the Journal des Débats on Balzac, will, we hope, be collected

into a volume like the present. It cannot but be an object of interest in this country to see how our great historian and novelists are estimated by so sagacious a critic. The general defect we find, and that most people find, in M. Taine's criticism, is that he endeavours to wall up that "sujet divers et ondoyant," called man, in the narrow limits of a formula. It is this tendency which has induced us to style him a Hegelian.

We have kept for the conclusion a gem of a work which every one should put into his carpet bag when bound on a villegiatura during the ensuing summer. Its author is one of the most illustrious ecclesiastics of the day, being no less a person than the Abbé Bautain, sometime Vicar-General of Paris, and author of several very remarkable works on Philosophy. We allude especially to the Philosophie du Christianisme, and Psychologie Experimentale. These beautiful conseils spirituels on the right use of a séjour in the country are couched in the shape of a series of letters to one Eugènes. Of course there are many passages and strains of thought here and there in the volume, which can only be duly relished and cordially approved by readers of the same persuasion as the author; but he must indeed be an ill-conditioned churl, and a sorry Christian, who will allow these occasional blemishes— we would gladly use a milder word if we could hit on it-to interrupt the flow, or cool the warmth, of that hearty admiration which the book deserves as a whole. M. Bautain's object is to enable his "readers in the country" to reach a frame of mind, and to acquire habits of life most congenial to the scenes by which they are daily surrounded. He passes over in succession all the usual round of occupations for each day, and endeavours to draw from them lessons which we doubt not-so truthful is the bookhe is the first to practise himself, and the last so modest is his tone-to allow that he does so.