and improbable; the heroine therein is married to a gentleman who is a compound of Faust and Mephistophiles, of Juan, Charles Moore, Werther, and the Corsair; who is half savage, half soft, and who rejoices in the name of Horace de Beauzinval. He is a delicate creature who kills tigers, slays wild boars, sings rumblingly in bass, thrillingly in counter-tenor, and who, though in Paris the glass of fashion and the mould of form, occasionally retires to an old dilapidated chateau in Normandy where, in conjunction with two friends, Henry and Max, he contrives to play the brigand and murderer, without detection. Pauline, in feminine alarm at a somewhat protracted absence of her husband, determines to leave Paris and look for him in Normandy. Her unexpected arrival leads to a chaos of incidents, among which the two fearful nights of her sojourn, the sorcerer-like attendance of the wild Malay, and the scenes of debauchery and assassination which reveal to her the true occupation of her husband, are told with a power familiar to the readers of the most highly-spiced of M. Dumas's romances. Horace, dreading betrayal on the part of his wife, shuts her up in a vault with "a cup of cold poison," and a civil letter of apology. He gives out that she has been assassinated; and he buries in her stead the body of a young English lady whom he shoots for that especial purpose. Pauline is discovered by an old lover, Alfred de Nerval, who carries her to England as his sister, and who returns temporarily to France to kill Horace in a duel, for having dared to aspire to the hand of a kinswoman of Alfred's. Pauline lingers on in ill health, and does not allow her own mother to be conscious of an existence which she feels must soon terminate,—and by a knowledge of which her mother would only have to mourn a second time. She finally dies in Italy. Now the comicality in this story of horrors lies in the grave portion of it which has England for its scene, and only some twenty years ago for its period. The lovers conceal themselves in a cottage orné in Piccadilly! They have the good fortune to find in that retired spot, "a pretty little house, very simple, and quite isolated!" It is a charming little cot, with green

blinds, a little garden full of flowers, an exquisite lawn, gravelled walks encircling" all; and a "banc au dessous d'un platane magnifique qui couvroit de sa tente de feuillage une partie du jardin !!!" All this, it must be remembered, is described as existing in Piccadilly, in 1834, within view of a person turning out of St. James's Street, and which latter circumstance would fix the precise locality of this isolated cottage as somewhere about the solitary purlieus of the romantic White Horse Cellar, or the picturesque and uninhabited wilderness tenanted by "the Black Bear." An absurdity scarcely less remarkable on the part of M. Dumas is that of fixing the residence of a very hard-working apothecary in one of the patrician mansions in Grosvenor Square! And yes the author has been in London, and has even, like Voltaire, commented upon our language. The sum, indeed, of his observations thereon amounts to the fact that Englishmen have abandoned the old expletive of "Godam," and that their throats are now generally engaged with discharging the cacophonous echoes of "Oh, ah!"

The French dramatists use us very little better, in many instances worse, than the novelists. They sell ladies by public auction in Smithfield Market, while half the house of peers stand by to witness the sale, and celebrate its conclusion by a conglomerated hornpipe. A French feuilletonist who came among us taking notes, in the year of the Exhibition, gravely certified to his country women that the gin-palaces of England were mainly supported by the middle-aged and elderly peeresses of the realm. I have myself seen on the French stage a drama, the scene of which is laid in the mountainous region that lies somewhere between Hyde Park and Richmond. In this piece there is an ancient castle, with a very wicked lord who maintains his evil eminence by the power and produce of forgery, and whose fair daughter, on her saint's day, is presented with bouquets presented to her processionally by all the grateful people of Brentford and Kew. The ruined chateau itself is on the romantic banks of the "St. George Canal," and near it is a village, the inhabitants of which have the laws interpreted to them by an alderman of

London, who is made ruler of the district by the special appointment conferred on him by "His Excellency the Lor' Maire."

The author of the work named at the head of this article is a limner of another quality. He has seen what he describes; and he paints well that which he has observed with the mental as well as the visual eye. Accordingly, he does not, like French litterateurs, represent us as something different from all other existing human nature. We may not always feel flattered by his portrait, but we cannot deny the resemblance, nor the good-humoured spirit which influenced the hand by which it is drawn.

It is something pleasant to turn from the misrepresentations of such writers, however temporarily amusing they may be, to contemplate portraits of our selves dashingly and good-humouredly, philosophically and candidly sketched by such an artist as Max Schlesinger. There is something highly original in the dramatic form in which many of the author's raciest observations are made. A certain Doctor Kief is generally charged with the duty of cutting us up; and on one occasion, when something stronger than usual is required to be flung at us, a French gentleman performs the office with a vigour and an absence of veracity that are highly entertaining. Mr. Schlesinger, however, does not appear to have employed this form because he had suspicions of our being an oversensitive people, for he now and then hits us smartly and stingingly, severely and deservedly enough. He has adopted the form because it gave him latitude of observation and expression. One thing is certain, that there is no nation under the sun that so goodhumouredly bears being laughed at as our own. The heartiest enjoyers of "Les Anglaises pour rire," have ever been those at whom the satire was levelled; and throughout Germany the broadest grins called up by Kotzebue's "Sir John," mantle on the faces of British auditors, who are perhaps more tickled by comic evidences of ignorance than by the wit levelled at their own habits and morals.

The Saunterer in and about London paints both our in and out-door life with, generally speaking, very great

correctness. And this general correctness cannot be gainsaid, because he often looks upon us and our doings from a point of view whence we have never considered them ourselves. A determined difference of opinion often, indeed, springs up in the mind of the reader; but when he has meditated for a moment upon the light in which the artist has limned his picture, he is compelled to conclude that the details are not exaggerated, and that the light in which they are shown does sometimes illumine them, and is more likely to be seen by a stranger than by ourselves, who are less curious on the matter.

Perhaps, and it is as well to say it at once and have done with it, it is with the author's political sentiments that the reader will be least inclined to agree. When he insinuates that the continental revolutionists, who in 1848 advocated licence and thought it was liberty, were men who were performing as patriotic a duty as that performed by Russell when he gloriously conspired against our illegal government, it is only the ultra-radicals among his readers who will endorse the sentiment. They who made an accomplished fact of our revolution never perilled the general liberty which they sought to establish. They who in 1848 let loose the deluge against the thrones of Europe, swept away with it the freedom which they professed to support; not that there was not among them many a bold and honest, hopeful and enduring heart, whose aspirations were for that liberty which allows unconstrained action for all, save where it may be injurious to any. Max Schlesinger very aptly meets one objection made in England, by a remark which is worth quoting:"These English sages," he says, not consider how much easier it was for their ancestors to bring the contest with the power of the Crown to a successful issue. The English patriots were not opposed by large standing armies. The contest lay between them and a single family and its faction, and

"do

this is a point which has never been sufficiently dwelt upon-they had no reason to fear a foreign intervention." This is true, yet not wholly so. It is, however, sufficiently correct to be allowed to pass unquestioned. The au

thor compares liberty as it is abstractedly viewed by English, French, and German. The first resolved to possess, and have manfully held by and progressed under it. The second seize it, let it slip through their fingers, and recapture only again to lose what they shed oceans of blood to obtain. The Germans, he evidently thinks, would accomplish all that the English have done had they but our advantagesinsular position, and security from external false friends as well as declared foes. This reminds us of how the same three people are described by Heyne as estimating liberty, and which description may be thus abridged, to edification:

"The Englishman loves freedom as he does his lawful wife. He possesses her, and if he does not treat her with any ostentatious show of tenderness, yet does he know, should the case require it, how to defend her like a man. Then, woe-betide the intruder into her holy chamber of rest, be it as gallant or be it as knave. The Frenchman loves freedom as he does his betrothed bride. He glows for her. He burns for her. He throws himself at her feet with the most exaggerated adjurations. He fights for her, despising death for her sake; and in her name he commits no end of follies. But the German loves freedom as he does his venerable grandmother! . . . The splenetic Briton perhaps wearies of his wife, and disposes of her in the marketplace; a halter round her neck, and Smithfield the locality. The fluttering Frenchman probably turns faithless to his bride, and goes dancing and singing after some court lady in the royal palace. But the German will never turn his venerable grandmother into the street; he will ever grant her a corner by the hearth, where she may tell to his listening children her old wife's tales for ever."

By this it is clear that Heyne reproaches his countrymen as possessing a superabundance of sentiment and lacking the spirit of action. Max Schlesinger, on the other hand, appears to think that they want nothing but opportunity. The two opinions, however apparently incompatible, may nevertheless be reconciled. But let us go with the Saunterer from politics to the Battle of Waterloo, as it is

fought by the light companies, on a gala night, at Vauxhall. Here are the author's opinions upon what he saw, put into the ever-conveniently-open mouth of Dr. Kief.

National prejudice is like a pig-tail, you can't see it in front. It is scandalous how they teach history in your schools. This new friend of mine is a well-bred man, but he has never heard of Blucher. We looked at the Duke of Wellington riding over the field of Waterloo, and I said, "Couldn't you find a place for our Blucher?" "Blutcher!" said he, "who is Blutsher?" He knew nothing whatever of Blucher and the Prussian army! and when I told him, but for the Prussians, Wellington would have been made mincedmeat of at Waterloo, he actually laughed in my face! Now tell me how do they teach history in your schools?

We may answer that history is taught after another fashion than Dr. Kief and prejudice would require. Lamartine, Jules Maurel, and, if we mistake not, Baron Muffling, have done justice to Wellington, and the completeness of his victory ere the indeed long-wished-for Prussians arrived to pursue the routed columns of the Gaul. And as to Blucher's name not being known in this country, it is immortalized in one way among us, exactly as Wellington's has been, by giving a distinctive appellation to a certain form of British boot. To deny the Duke the undoubted merit of his great deed is only to treat him as he has been treated by that stricken wit Heyne, who says of him, with incredible profanity and malice, that the name of Wellington, in connection with that of Napoleon, will go down to posterity as that of Pontius Pilate in connection with Jesus Christ. This is worse than our merely forgetting Blucher, even if we had been so ungrateful. But this we were not. When the allied monarchs arrived in England in July, 1814, Blucher was (as far as our public was concerned) "the king amang them a'." The popular enthusiasm of the people for him who had boldly faced the common enemy of Europe when others had fled before that foe was so intense, that when the hero set foot on shore at Dover, he was nearly suffocated with embraces, and his cloak was torn into fragments. The excitement of ladies in the capital was not inferior to that which reigned in the