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series of cold gallantries and heartless triumphs. In the course of his attendance upon court, where he held a post of honor about the king, he fell deeply in love with the beautiful Princess Julia, of Savoy Carignan. She was young, tender, and simple-hearted, and returned his love with equal fervor. Her family took the alarm at this attachment, and procured an order that she should inhabit the Abbey of Montmartre, where she was treated with all befitting delicacy and distinction, but not permitted to go beyond the convent walls. The lovers found means to correspond. One of their letters was intercepted, and it is even hinted that a plan of elopement was discovered. A duel was the consequence, with one of the fiery relations of the princess. Letoriéres received two sword-thrusts in his right side. His wounds were serious, yet after two or three days' confinement, he could not resist his impatience to see the princess. He succeeded in scaling the walls of the abbey, and obtaining an interview in an arcade leading to the cloister of the cemetery. The interview of the lovers was long and tender. They exchanged vows of eternal fidelity, and flattered themselves with hopes of future happiness, which they were never to realize. After repeated farewells, the princess reentered the convent, never again to behold the charming Letoriéres. On the following morning, his corpse was found stiff and cold on the pavement of the cloister!

It would seem that the wounds of the unfortunate youth had been reopened by his efforts to get over the wall; that he had refrained from calling assistance, lest he should expose the princess, and that he had bled to death, without any one to aid him, or to close his dying eyes.

WITH these romances of real life, drawn from what profess to be authentic memoirs, and characteristic of aristocratical French life, during the early part of the last century, I shall for the present, Mr. Editor, take my leave. Yours, etc.,

G. C.

CLEANLINESS.

'Cleanliness is Godliness.'- FULLER.

PERFUMES more sweet from many a flower exhale,
And gaudier colors many a blossom bears,

Than hover round the lily of the vale

Than the pale violet of the meadow wears:

Yet, culled from all the daughters of the field,

With this thy chesnut locks thou lov'st to deck;
Preferred o'er all the lavish gardens yield,
That rests upon the ivory of thy neck

These simple flowers what secret charm endears?
Ah, if it be so pure, so neat, they seem,

Bathed in the dew of Morning's costliest tears,
Or tinged with Evening's last declining beam;

So may'st thou emulate their virgin art,
Please every eye, and live in every heart.

LITERARY NOTICES.

NORTH AMERICAN HERPETOLOGY: OR, A DESCRIPTION OF THE REPTILES INHABITING THE UNITED STATES. By JOHN EDWARDS HOLBROOK, M. D., Professor of Anatomy in the Medical College of South Carolina; Member of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh; Corresponding Member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and of the New-York and Baltimore Lyceums of Natural History. In two vols. 4to. pp. 245. Philadelphia: J. DOBSON.

WHY should Doctor JOHN EDWARDS HOLBROOK - than whom, considering the years which have as yet traced their pathway across his brow, no member of the learned and well-fed profession to which he is so honorably attached, has had better opportunity of becoming versed in the refined and occult enjoyments of the table-why should he-how could he have passed over, with a dry and sterile notice of cold approbation, and of 'faint praise,' the delightful, the luminous attributes of the incomparable Esculent, to which, in its varieties, so many of the pages of his beautiful and scientific work have been devoted?

We advert not to his lizards; and with the entire race of the Colubri are irreconcileably at war: nor would we dwell in admiration even upon his frogs; those that are potted by CAMUS of Rochelle, and that have graced our markets in admirable abundance and condition during the last two years, being, we apprehend, less agile in their vaulting ambition than their enterprising brethren of this migratory country, are distinguished by a certain redundancy and delicacy in the parts, that ours can never hope to possess, until less than at present given to frolicksome exercise, and to the idle love of change and novelty of place. It is on Thee that our thoughts rest in golden light, Emys Reticulata! Emys Mobilensis! - Testudo Terrapin, Emys Terrapin! Quocunque nomine gaudes; ubicumque sis invenienda! Under what designation soever thou mayest be classed; in whatever order of being ranked; in whatsoever quarter of our happy land thou mayest have been found, or style of cookery served; in china, on delf, on silver; come to us at supper as a stew; or descend to our ravished sight at dinner upon some raw and gusty day, in the noblest fashion of a soup; - disguise thyself as thou wilt; wear but a cookery that may deserve the name; and the table exists not, that thou wilt not embellish and adorn with incontestable supremacy of good!

Alas! that in the impartial, the stern justice that must ever distinguish the station of authority that we hold, it should belong to us to qualify praise that comes from the cockles of a heart too lately warmed by the genial influences of such delicious recreation, to admit a single thought of disfavor that is not warranted by truth: but O, entire genus of Testudo and of Emys!-vast and increasing host of countless tribes of the Testudines-by whose timid eyes, and cautiously-emerging heads, and variegated necks, we perceive our editorial throne at this moment to be surrounded in myriads on our call-it is to your fair sex that we would almost exclusively apply these laudatory words; their eggs, their livers, and their captivating limbs, deserve indeed to be chanted in songs of triumph, by the voice of woman! But your males-it is our sense of duty that extracts from us the painful declaration - unless in extreme youth, are hard, impracticable, tough, and desperately dry; in this respect resembling too closely the moral and the

distinctive characters of our own exalted race; so that we know not whether the man exists, against whom we could decree a punishment so severe, as to waste the efforts of a well-earned appetite upon the unsatisfactory carcass of one of your old Bulls! Even the liver of the old monster, that glory of the youth of his own sex, fades before the ordeal of the stew-pan, and may be known at a glance, by its shrivelled and unattractive aspect in the dish, however cherished through culinary art into a delusive and momentary freshness, by the joys of claret and the revivifying force of sherry!

To the world then, at large, to the hunter, and especially to the cook, we would em. phatically say, in this assembled presence, whom we here dismiss, AVOID BULL TERRAPINS!

And this brings us to the quiet consideration of the next remark that we have to make upon the work before us; that its learned author has omitted to instruct the uninitiated admirer of these precious offerings of nature, in what manner, or by what rule, he is to distinguish this old and worse than valueless encumberer of the soil and of the markets, from the individuals who can charm his board and fascinate his guests..

In the first place, then, it should be known, that by oft-repeated hybernation, by burrowing in the marshes year after year, and by incidental collision and friction, the concentric striæ of the shell of the old villain become gradually less and less well-defined, until the lines are at last comparatively smooth, and almost entirely effaced. Again, whether it be from the natural cares and anxieties of life, or from some other cause, the back becomes in age more and more convex and spherical about the shoulders; and he looks, in short, like one of those old courbé Frenchmen who never die; that are occasionally seen emerging from a Cul de Sac, in a coat of the lightest imaginable blue, with silver buckles in their shoes, their toes turned out, that can now never again turn in, and playing the beau at eighty-four. There are also a rigidity and a dryness in the coating that covers the legs, at the same time that it hangs in a flaccid state about them, ‘a world too wide for these shrunk shanks;' and various other indications, that need not here be particularized, but by means of which, although the unpractised eye of the young house-keeper may be deceived, old fellows know each other all the world over. We have nothing but praise to offer to the author in other respects. The work is well got up, and the style of the plates must have gratified even his own expectation and taste; and we look forward with pleasure to the time, when, in noticing some subsequent edition, in which the Doctor shall portray our favorite with something of the gusto with which WALTON, for example, makes us in love with his unworthy chubb, it will belong to us, if it should be omitted in the work, to furnish a recipe for the cookery of a dish of terrapins, that shall set all Paris at defiance, and the world itself at fault.

HEADS OF THE PEOPLE, OR PORTRAITS OF THE ENGLISH.
New-York: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

London: ROBERT TYAS.

NUMBER FIVE of this very clever publication reached us by the last steam-packet. Its spirit, literary and pictorial, is maintained unflaggingly. The illustrations of the number are, the 'Poor Curate,' the 'Bum-boat Woman,' the 'Pawnbroker,' and the 'Quack Doctor.' The last-mentioned sketch is capital, and the letter-press illustration even better still. Such 'physicians' as this illustrious subject, with his quackery and hypocritical cant, are the men whom SWIFT contends should withhold their judgments of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not permitted to be jurors upon life and death. The high-sounding, no-meaning style of Dr. DIDDAM's pill advertisement would do honor to the author of 'A Tribute to the Memory of FITZHUGH SMITH.' He informs the reader, that 'universal correspondence to the characteristics of veracity is the only sure mark of truth; hence a trial of the pills is earnestly solicited from all those who are laboring under any of those diversified ailments which obnubilate the chequered path of existence!' The 'position and corollary under notice' are scarcely of equal clearness.

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FRANCE, ITS KING, COURT, AND GOVERNMENT. BY AN AMERICAN. One vol., pp. 191. New-York: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

THIS work, as is now indeed well known, is from the pen of our minister to the court of France, Governor Cass. Of the author's qualities as a writer, our readers have heretofore had occasion to judge, in the pages of this Magazine. They will not therefore be surprised to learn, that the style of the volume under notice is easy, simple, and perspicuous, and that the contents are imbued with interest, 'from title-page to colophon.' The work is devoted to a minute narrative of the history of the present King of France, especially of his travels and adventures, many years ago, while simply 'Duc de Chartres,' in this country; sketches of French society, and particularly of those public occasions which include the observance of forms connected with the official relations of foreign functionaries; pictures in little, but evidently faithful, of the different members of the royal family; together with numerous episodes, suggested by American, French, and English contrasts of character, manners, or customs; with not a few capital anecdotes, colloquially exhibited, and as fresh and racy as if heard at one's own table, from the lips of the writer himself. Governor Cass, although surrounded by the fascinations of French society, and evidently a great 'favorite at court,' is con tinually recurring to his experience of American life in the western wildernesses; and we cannot help thinking, such is his reminiscential gusto, that he looks back with a lingering, preeminent affection upon scenes and adventures among the

Piled leaves of the west,

His own green forest land.'

We observe, with a gratification which would have been enhanced were the game better worth the candle, that our author has seen proper, in an appropriate vein of satirical pleasantry, to turn the tables upon a class of English travellers, who have made our country the theatre of their excursions, and the subject of their books. The list of what the writer has 'seen, heard, and read' of the kingly usages, domestic manners, and other 'spectacles' of the mother people, may be taken as an ample set-off against the worst perversions of the worst travelling book-makers that England has yet spawned upon our shores. There is something irresistibly ludicrous, to a republican observer, in many of the facts here set down. Alluding to a remark of BURKE, that it was 'not proper that great noblemen should be keepers of dogs, even though they were the Queen's dogs,' Governor CASS mentions, that a peer of England, a hereditary legislator and judge, is a keeper of her majesty's hounds; another nobleman is a turnspit in her kitchen; a third personage is a leather-breeches maker to the queen; a station, adds our author, 'which it is hoped may prove a sinecure!' And the writer might have added, that the noble 'Controller of Her Majesty's Tape office, and Custos of the Sealing-Wax Department,' has but little reason to look down upon his fellow officeholders, the 'Purveyor of Asses' Milk to the Royal Family,' and the 'Bed-bug Destroyer to Her Majesty!' But what will our parvenu imitators of every thing that is said to be 'an English custom,' or a 'French custom' - who would sooner go without their meat, than use a knife in conveying it to their mouths say, when they are informed, on the authority of one so likely to be familiar with the usage du monde as the American minister at Paris, that 'the knife is used in the best company in Europe?' And now that tooth-picks, in defiance of the anathemas of CHESTERFIELD, the arbiter elegantiarum of his day, are as regularly placed beside the plate of each English guest as the knife, fork, and spoon, and as regularly used, we shall look to see a deluge of these useful instruments from abroad, or an enhanced liveliness in the American quill market. Seriously, however, we may hope that the plain good sense of an American gentleman, like Governor Cass, possessing the very best opportunities of observance and judgment, will not be without its effect, in such trivial matters, upon the less national and self-respectful of his countrymen.

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EDITORS' TABLE.

'CARLYLE-ISM.' - Our anonymous correspondent, 'C. F.,' in a private note to the Editor, complaining of the return of his communication entitled as above, assumes erroneous premises, and thus destroys his own argument. With a single exception, every quotation he makes, in justification of his wholesale condemnation of 'CARLYE'S style,' is from the pens of that gentleman's imitators in this country; writers who ape the faults only of their original, and greatly exaggerate even these; who clothe common-place thoughts in a strange garb, which is nevertheless not sufficiently grotesque to divert the reader's attention from the intellectual penury it fain would cover; writers, in short, who seem wholly to forget that

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From such literary 'friends' and imitators, the author of 'Sartor Resartus' may well implore to be saved. We repeat, there are many things in CARLYLE's style that a plain reader would desire to see amended; yet it may be questioned whether such is now his Germanized intellect any material change would not lose us much that we should be reluctant to part with. There are some things in the 'French Revolution,' and not a few in the 'Miscellanies' of our author, which we are in doubt whether to call very good or very bad, though we are sure they are one or the other. As wit is nearly allied to madness, so there is but a very narrow boundary between the utmost excursions of wit, and the first sallies of frenzy. When MILTON talks of 'visible darkness,' of 'prodigies produced by nature,' of 'death that lives,' and 'life that dies,' one feels that he has reached the last verge of propriety, and is apt to doubt whether or no he has not passed it. So when POPE supposes NEWTON to be shown by angels, as a monkey is by men, one's taste is as much in doubt about his propriety, as his judgment is about that of MILTON. Yet these and a few kindred blemishes are not enough, we may believe, even in the eyes of 'C. F.,' to justify the 'extirpation from our literature' of such writers as MILTON and POPE. A new work from Mr. CARLYLE's pen, now lying before us, and a few notes upon the English edition of his 'French Revolution,' made some months since, will afford the nucleus for a brief exposition of 'CARLYLE-ISM,' which it is hoped may have an interest for the general reader, as well as for our dissenting correspondent.

A small volume entitled 'CHARTISM,' of an hundred pages and upward, by Mr. CARLYLE, has recently been issued from the press of Messrs. LITTLE AND BROWN, Boston. It bears the significant motto, 'It never smokes, but there is a fire,' and its tendency is to show that there are causes at work among the over-wrought population of Great Britain, that must result in some substantial relief to the lower orders of society; to men struggling for a man-like place and relation, in a world where they see themselves One chapter is especially devoted to the 'finest peasantry in the world;'

men.

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