ment le pied scc, et l'humidité a fini par rouvrir les blessures de ma bonne jambe. Je ne pouvais plus suivre l'escouade; il a fallu déposer les armes. Voilà deux mois que j'ai cessé de travailler à l'assainissement de Paris.

"Au premier instant, ça m'a étourdi. De mes quatre membres, il ne me restait plus que la main droite; encore avait elle perdu sa force. Fallait donc lui trouver une occupation bourgeoise. Après avoir essayé un peu de tous, je suis tombé sur le cartonnage; et me voici fabricant d'étuis pour les pompons de la garde nationale; c'est une œuvre peu lucrative, mais à la portée de toutes les intelligences. En me levant à quatre heures et en travaillant jusqu'à huit, je gagne 65 centimes (about 64d)! Le logement et la gamelle en prennent 50; reste trois sous pour les dépenses de luxe. Je suis donc plus riche que la France, puisque j'équilibre mon budget, et je continue à la servir, puisque je lui économise ses pompons."

Now, it is possible that in reproducing these pictures of humble life on the Continent, we may have selected exceptions rather than examples; it may be that in contrasting the quiet and even tenor of middle-class life in Germany and France with the turmoil, crush, and hurry of existence in England and America, we have drawn both in somewhat too vivid colors, and with too sharp an outline; still we cannot doubt the general correctness of the impression we have received and endeavored to convey; after every discount and deduction has been made the broad fact will still remain,—that if our analogues abroad are often too torpid, passive, and unenterprising, we, on the contrary, are too restless, striving, and insatiable; that our extreme is assuredly not the happiest, nor possibly the noblest; and that, at all events, without exchanging it for theirs, we might do well to abandon it for some juste milieu, in which our course of life might become "a sanity and not a madness."

rect; they work deeper, but they work slower; they work upon the few first, and afterwards through these upon the many; they affect the present age probably much less, but future ages infinitely more.

There are many reasons why we should look upon novels in this serious point of view. They are the sole or the chief reading of numbers, and these numbers are mainly to be found among the rich and idle, whose wealth, leisure, and social position combine to give to their tastes and example an influence wholly out of proportion either to their mental activity or to their mental powers. They are the reading of most men in their idler and more impressionable hours, when the fatigued mind requires rest and recreation; when the brain, therefore, is comparatively passive; and when, the critical and combative faculties being laid to sleep, the pabulum offered is imbibed without being judged or sifted. They form, too, an unfortunately large proportion of the habitual reading of the young at the exact crisis of life when the spirit is at once most susceptible and most tenacious,

"Wax to receive, and marble to retain ";

when the memory is fresh, and has a greedy and by no means discriminating appetite; when the moral standard is for the most part fluctuating or unformed; when experience affords no criterion whereby to separate the true from the false in the delineations of life, and the degree of culture is as yet insufficient to distinguish the pure from the meretricious, the sound from the unsound, in taste; and when whatever keenly interests and deeply moves is accepted and laid to heart, without much questioning whether the emotion is genuine and virtuous, or whether the interest is not aroused by unsafe and unwarrantable means. Finally, novels constitute a principal part of the reading of women, who are always impressionable, in whom at all times the emotional element is more awake and more powerful than the critical, whose feelings are more easily aroused and whose estimates are more easily influenced than ours, while at the

same time the correctness of their feelings and the justice of their estimates are matters of the most special and pre-eminent concern.

There are peculiarities, again, in works of fiction, which must always secure them a vast influence on all classes of societies and all sorts of minds. They are read without effort, and remembered without trouble. We have to chain down our attention to read other books with profit; these enchain our attention of themselves. Other books often leave no impression on the mind at all; these, for good or evil, for a while or for long, always produce some impression. Other books are effective only when digested and assimilated; novels usually need no digestion, or rather present their matter to us in an already digested form. Histories, philosophies, political treatises, to a certain extent even first-class poetry, are solid and often tough food, which requires laborious and slow mastication. Novels are like soup or jelly; they may be drunk off at a draught or swallowed whole, certain of being easily and rapidly absorbed into the system.

A branch of literature which exercises an influence so considerable on men of leisure at all times, on men of business in their hours of relaxation, on the young of both sexes, and on the female sex at every age, assuredly demands the most thorough study and the closest censorship on the part of those who wish to comprehend, or who aspire to modify, the causes which mould humanity. There can be no doubt that a far larger number of persons receive the bias of their course and the complexion of their character from reading novels than from hearing sermons. We do not, indeed, hear of sudden conversions and entire and enduring changes of life and temper consequent on the perusal of romances, such as are occasionally said to follow the stirring eloquence of some great divine; though we believe that more analogous cases might be found than is usually supposed, were there any missionary enthusiasts to chronicle them, and were the recipients of the new spirit skilful and careful to trace

back the healing influence to its source. But we are convinced that the instances are numerous beyond conception in which souls trembling and hesitating on the verge of good and evil have been determined towards the former by some scene of fiction falling in their way at the critical moment of their moral history; in which minds have been sustained in hours of weakness and strengthened in hours of temptation by lifelike pictures of sorrows endured and trials surmounted in virtue of some great principle or some true sentiment; and in which sinners, fallen indeed, but not lost, have been induced to pause, to recoil, and to recover, by seeing in some work which they had opened only for amusement the hideousness of a crime whose revolting features they could not recognize except when reflected in a mirror. Numbers have first, not learned perhaps, but been actually brought to perceive and realize with practical result the attractions of "whatsoever things are pure, holy, lovely, and of good report," by seeing their vivid delineations in the pages of "an owre true tale." Numbers who might no doubt have acquired their estimates of the relative gravity or excellence of favorite faults or difficult virtues from authorized Bibles or accredited moralists, have in reality learned them—often, alas, blended with a fearful degree of error-from fictitious histories; and seek their personal code of laws in Scott, or Bulwer, or Victor Hugo, or George Sand, or the Countess HahnHahn, or Manzoni, in place of drawing it direct and pure from the Catechism or the Gospel. And far larger numbers still, as we may all of us be conscious from our own experience, owe it to the novels with which they occasionally refresh their wayworn spirits along the world's hot and dusty thoroughfare, that the perception of the beautiful, the enthusiasm for the grand, and all the finer sentiments and gentler and tenderer emotions which soften and embellish life, are not utterly dried up, or crusted over, or trodden out, amid the fatigues and conflicts and turmoil of this arid and weary existence.

There is yet another consideration which points in the