chancellor and Mr. Saurin : he usually walks alone. He stoops considerably, although there is nothing of feebleness in his step and general movement. The master of the rolls, the excellent Judge Burton, and some of the older lawyers, may be seen riding slowly to the scene of business. Among the mounted,' however, the Baron Norbury cuts the most distinguished figure; he rides rapidly, and is generally accompanied by two servants, who, instead of following him at a distance, as is the usual custom, keep constantly at his side. In the fat red face of this renowned judge you can trace nothing but extreme stupidity: he seems to have lived merely to eat, drink, and joke. He has acquired a celebrity, but it is a celebrity of rather an unenviable cast. The utter silliness displayed in his charges and addresses has drawn upon him the contempt even of the mob: they sneer at him as he passes; the frequenters of the Common Pleas are heartily tired of him, but he wants the virtue of resignation. To use his own elegant language he will die in the harness.' As you proceed towards Essex Bridge your eye is caught by the imposing figure of O'Connell. Some fat attorney, some country client, or political follower, usually hangs upon his arm; and the conversation probably takes a legal or a political turn, according to the cha

а

racter of the individual. The step of O'Connell is quite characteristic; in his movement there is a palpable outpouring of vanity, a locomotive evidence of self-complacence. As if to make the contrast more striking, you will, in all probability, find at the very heels of the great leader' the gentle and over-modest Mr. North. This gentleman is one that an observer of human nature cannot look upon without feeling interested. He is young, yet his locks are thin and silvery: his step is slow even to a fault; he stoops, and wears his hat rather down. His countenance is expressively intellectual; but there is a hue of sickliness spread over it that operates to its disadvantage. Moving along the Lower Quay you meet Sheil, fastened to the arm of some overgrown attorney, generally talking, supplying all the conversation himself. Indeed Sheil appears to be what Dr. Johnson would term 'a tremendous converser;' but to such a man few would refuse a long and patient hearing. After him stalks in solemn loneliness the talented son of a talented father, W. H. Curran. To that father he bears a striking resemblance; he is taller, however, and has infinitely less of animation. A few fat-headed briefless stragglers bring up the rear; they generally seem in as much haste as the others, going forward simply to do nothing.

In the metropolis of France there is always a prevailing mode by which the public taste is regulated:

Fashion in every thing bears sov'reign sway;'

haut ton will appear in bonnets as different from each other as the costumes of the Icelanders are from those of the Hottentots. The poor people, who only set their caps according to the examples of their betters, are then in utter consternation. They have a faint notion that both fashions cannot be right; but they dare not say which is wrong. They wish they had no heads at all, or that Nature had given them two, and enabled them to follow each mode without offending the patroness of either. At length they resolve upon one, which, having chosen, they must wear, but which is no sooner on their heads than they are convinced they have made an unlucky selection. So, magnis parva componere, is it with the affairs of the literary world. There are two parties which divide all Paris on such subjects they are the Classic and the Romantic factions. The adhe rents of the former can see nothing good but what is written according to rule; they would have all the excursions of Fancy made on the beaten turnpike-roads directed by the commissioners of antiquity, and think that books ought to be made as fortifications are built, after a fixed plan, and upon unchangeable principles. So accurate are the rules which they would lay down, and, as they say, so firmly established by the examples of all great geniuses of antiquity, that we hear it is in contemplation at the French Institute to make public a steam-engine for writing books upon every subject. All the experiments hitherto made particularly those upon dramatic compositions-have been found to answer very much; and we understand Mr. Elliston is now in treaty with the academy for several bales of new tragedies. He is quite delighted with the invention, because it will save him the trouble of beating his refractory authors; a practice which, however necessary to the proper conduct of his establishment, he finds extremely fatiguing at his advanced time of life. They decry modern literature generally; and the objects of their most bitter denunciation are those of England and of Germany. On the other hand, the lovers of the

Romantic scorn the fetters by which genius has been held down in other times. They confess that Homer, and Virgil, and the Greek tragedians, were tall fellows of their hands: they do not deny that the Iliad' was very well in its day; and even now is not altogether unamusing; but the public taste has changed. What was good once is relished no longer; and they think that the ancients, however respectable their memory may be, would, like all other dead people, make disagreeable companions for the existing generation. They are therefore so good as to strike out a new system, which they call romantic, and which is more like a masquerade than any other thing in the world.

Ossian's Poems,' Young's Night Thoughts,' (which, chose etonnante! is a great favourite with the gayest people in the world),Goethe's Faust,' and the late Lord Byron, are absurdly mingled in their notions of the sublime and beautiful.

Between these two parties the Vicomte d'Arlincourt has been bandied until his talents seem to have suffered from the discipline he has undergone. The Classiques vote him a Romantique, while the Romantiques deny his fellowship, and insist that he is of the adverse faction.' Each of them praises in the unlucky works of the Vicomte just those parts which the others condemn, and vice versa. He, trying to please both parties, shares the fate common to all people so amiably disposed; he satisfies neither, and cramps his own exertions. He attempts a severe and simple style, and he succeeds only in making it obscure and flat. He would express passionate emotions, and the stormy excitement of high minds; but he only describes maniacs, and spoils what would really be good by exaggerating it. He himself feels the difficulty of his situation; and is indignant, we must say with some justice, at the treatment he has experienced from his friends as well as his enemies; and exclaims, with hearty good will, A plague o' both your houses!' In a passage which is written with a good deal of feeling, he explains his own opinions as to the romantique style, and disclaims the authority which it is attempted to exercise over

him by the critics who pretend to patronise his works.

If

If,' he says, the Romantique (and thus it is that M. d'Arlincourt understands it) means that passionate aspiration of a lofty and religious spirit towards the sublime and the infinite; if it consists in constantly elevating the thoughts beyond the narrow limits of ordinary life; if its principal object is to fathom the mysteries of the soul, and to develop the most noble passions of the heart; M. d'Arlincourt is of this school. the romantique consists in continually keeping up the analogy between things earthly and things heavenly; in offering as a consolation to the miseries of the present existence the blessings of that which is to come; to give to every recital, every picture, every idea a moral tendency, as has been done by Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Chateaubriand, Byron, Goethe, Schiller, &c. then M. d'Arlincourt is romantique.

'But if the romantique (and thus it is that the fanatics of the school understand it) consists in the absence of all rule and all fitness, in the disregard of all propriety, in the abandonment of every thing like a wise and deliberate plan, in the cultivation of bad taste, in disdain for the talents of all who have gone before, in admiration of every existing monstrosity, in the mixture of the ignoble and the grandiose, of the true and the false-in short, in a hatred of all that is elegant and refined in stylethen M. d'Arlincourt is not, and never will be, romantique.'

The fault of these partisans, is, that the blindness of their zeal makes that degenerate into idolatry, which, kept within proper bounds, would be not only rational, but praiseworthy. None but a blockhead would seek to impair the venerable character which the works of classical antiquity so justly enjoy; and he must be worse than a blockhead who would insist that in literature every modern effort is to be limited and regulated by models, which, however pure and beautiful, belong to times wholly different from our own. It is not from a disregard of ancient literature that a more modern style is cultivated; but because the spirit and tone of society

are changed, and the feelings and habits of mankind must be expressed in other forms, and under other modifications. Provided that this can be effected without any violation of the rules observed by the authors of antiquity, or, which is the same thing, without violating good taste and nature, the romantic style is in its way no less worthy of respect than the classic; and much better entitled to our affection and regard, because it comes more 'home to men's business and bosoms.'

None of the literature of modern Europe stands so much in need of improvement as that of France. Antiquated prejudices, and a formal affectation, have overgrown the best literary efforts of a people whose genius and language are calculated perhaps beyond all others for brilliant, if not for the most sedate, efforts. The ingrafting upon their own old stocks some of the hardy shoots of the more northern nations will have the effect of improving both, if it shall be pursued without exaggeration on the one side, and not met by an unreasonable hostility on the other. The advantages of such an importation are already appreciated by many of the literateurs of France, one of whom speaks of the end and the effect of Le Romantique on the literature of his own country in terms not less remarkable for their good sense than for the eloquence with which they are expressed.

To add,' he says, another chord to the lyre of antiquity; to twine for the Graces a coronal of fresh flowers, which shall replace that which time has begun to wither; to furnish more vivid and more various colouring to poetry; to infuse a religious subliinity in its more majestic efforts; to invest our language with a more frank, decided, and bold tone; to revive the declining sap of our literature; to open new regions to the flights of genius; to purify, and at the same time to multiply, the sources of figures and comparisons; to extend the bounds of the French drama; to restore their elasticity to some of its springs; to enrich it with new characters; to choose rather obeying the inspirations of religion, and

of recollections which are peculiarly our own, than to yielding servilely to impressions foreign from us; in short, to rely only upon our own resources;this is the glorious mission which La Littérature Romantique has come to fulfil amongst us; this is the end which it is intended to accomplish.' The examples of Casimir de la Vigne, of M. de la Martine, of M. Hugo, and of M. le Vicomte d'Arlincourt, will show how far and how beneficially the romantique style has penetrated into the literature of France.

We must now return to the romance of the Stranger,' from which these observations have in some degree led us, but by which they were suggested. It relates to the adventures of a young nobleman of France, to whom nature has given a mind open to every noble impulse, and to whom his evil destiny has given for a tutor an old cold-blooded person, who does all in his power to control the ardour of his pupil. Instead of attempting to effect this by reason, he seeks to accomplish it by deception. The hero, Arthur de Ravenstel, is, when the romance begins, on his journey to the castle of Montolin, where he is to be married to its young and beautiful mistress, the Lady Izolette. These events take place in the province of Brittany, under the reign of Philip Augustus, who has been compelled, by the excommunication of the Catholic Church, to give up his beloved consort Agnes de Meranie, and to permit her to retire from his throne into solitude.

In the neighbourhood of the castle of Montolin, a female of singular habits, and of extraordinary beauty, has recently appeared. Her benevolence makes her adored by the peasantry; but she shuns all attempts to learn her history. Arthur meets her by accident; and the slight impression which the charms of Izolette had made upon his heart is effaced by the attractions of the Stranger.' He loves her, and swears never to marry any other. In her language and demeanour there is a mysteriousness which even adds to Arthur's passion for her, because it prevents him from exercising his judgment. The following description of the

stranger is in M. le Vicomte's happiest style:

A young female, clothed in white, beautiful as a divinity, graceful as Love, was kneeling on the opposite bank before a figure of the Virgin, placed in the hollowed trunk of an old willow. She was motionless, and praying. Her form was the realization of our ideas of her by whom the destiny of the poet of Vaucluse was swayed, or of the ill-fated recluse of the Paraclete.

'Her face dejected, and on which an expression of pain was imprinted, had no longer the glow of the first age of love, but beamed with the finish and accomplishment of time. It was perfectly beautiful; and even her grief added to its charms. In her lovely eyes, of a deep divine blue, sad and downcast and languishing as they were, that voluptuousness of which her soul was ignorant, or which it rejected, seemed to stray. She could not be one of the village maidens; for, simple and chaste as her dress was, there was an air of nobility in her deportment unlike theirs. Her vestments were light as the aerial draperies of the seraphin of Raffaelle; her hands were white and delicate as the down of cygnets; her motion was as graceful as the bending flower beneath the caresses of the zephyrs; all around breathed grace, modesty, and feeling. Leaning against one of the stones of the fountain, she looked like a statue of Innocence offering up her vows to the Eternal.'

Arthur becomes jealous of the Baron de Valdebourg, who appears to be intimate with the stranger. He provokes him to a duel, in which he is badly wounded, and which terminates by his throwing the baron from a rock in the presence of the stranger, who cries out that he is her brother. Arthur faints from the effect of his wound, and is carried to the castle; where his tutor, finding the extent of his passion for the stranger, resolves to destroy her. He accuses her of the murder of the Baron de Valdebourg; and, unknown to Arthur, she is carried for trial before the prior of a neighbouring monastery. The sentence is about to be pronounced, when Arthur bursts into the chamber, having