n be called bad.
The two kinds may perhaps be divided under the head of earlier and later
works. When the tumultuous feelings and wild visions of youth were
calmed by age, a new kind of literary product came forth. And her life
in its latter years was as quiet as her books, and ran as little against
the traditions and usages of mankind.

George Sand was born in 1804, and descended from Marshal Saxe, the
natural son of the King of Poland. This Marshal Saxe was one of the
bravest but most licentious men of his time,--a time not noted for its
domestic virtues. She was brought up in the country until fifteen years
of age, in the midst of the elegancies of an aristocratic home. But her
unbounded vitality called loudly for an out-of-door life, and she lived
the life of a boy, never wearying of its rude sports, and enjoying its
sometimes dangerous excitements. At the close of her fifteenth year she
was taken to the Augustine Convent in Paris, where she remained for
three years, and where she passed through a very intense religious
experience and came near becoming a nun. It is a curious piece of
speculation to try to imagine what her life as a nun would have been,
had this design been carried out. Would the prayers and litanies, the
penances and the fasts, have tamed her wild blood? Would her nature have
still asserted itself under the cap of the sister? would she have led a
revolt against authority within the church as she did without? Are there
any such fierce, tumultuous natures as hers to-day kneeling on stony
cloister floors? Can matins and vespers, the odors of incense, and the
sacred ceremonial of the church fill up for an ardent nature all that
the service of the world supplies? We shall never know; for the real
history of a faithful daughter of the church will never be written. The
story of the three years of George Sand's convent life is very charming,
full of variety and sincerity, and matchless in point of style; but it
is a fragment.

She came out of the convent a young woman knowing absolutely nothing of
real life. The object of all who have charge of young girls in France is
to keep them in perfect ignorance of the world. The safety that lies in
knowledge is utterly forbidden to them. They are supposed to be
children, and are watched over as such until a marriage can be arranged.
And this marriage, whatever it may be, is usually accepted by the girl
as an escape from a sort of slavery. She is always told that s