solemn quartos and ponderous
octavos, to dip into pages having all the look and nearly all the
slightness of the modern novel. At all events, if they do nothing else,
they employ the time of pens, which might be much worse occupied; and
that pens are often much worse occupied, we have evidence from hour to
hour.

The French novels are making rapid way into our circulating libraries.
Yet nothing can be more unfortunate, for nothing can be more corrupting
than a French novel of the nineteenth century. France, always a
profligate country, always had profligate writers. But they were
generally confined to "Memoirs," "Court anecdotes," and the ridicule of
the world of Versailles; their criminality was at least partially
concealed by their good breeding, and their vice was not altogether
lowered to the grossness of the crowd.

The Revolution created a new school. All there was hatred to duty,
faith, and honour. The deepest profligacy was pictured as scarcely less
than the natural right of man; and all the abominations of the human
heart were excited, encouraged, and propagated by daring pens, sometimes
subtle, sometimes eloquent, and in all instances appealing to the most
tempting abominations of man.

But the Revolution fell, and with the ascendant of Napoleon another
school followed. War, public business, the general objects of the active
faculties, and strong ambition of a people with Europe at its feet,
partially superseded alike the frivolous taste of the monarchy, and the
rabid ferocities of revolutionary authorship. The Bulletins of the
"Grande Armee" told a daily tale of romance, to which the brains of a
Parisian scribbler could find no rival, and men with the sound of
falling thrones echoing in their ears, forgot the whispers of low
intrigue and commonplace corruption.

The "Three Glorious Days" of July 1830, have now produced another
change; and peace has given leisure to think of something else than
conquest and the conscription. The power of the national pen has turned
again to fiction, and the natural wit, habitual dexterity, and dashing
verbiage of France have all been thrown into the novel. Even the French
drama, once the pride of the nation, has perished under this sudden
pressure. A French modern tragedy is now only a rhymed melodrama. Even
French history attracts popular applause only as it approaches to a
three volume romance. Every man of name in French modern authorship has
attained it only by the r