dinary food for conjecture and meditation.

The state of _visible transition_ is the state of nearly all the
enlightened communities in Europe. But nowhere is it so pronounced as
in that country which may be called the Heart of European Civilization.
There, all to which the spirit of society attaches itself appears
broken, vague, and half developed,--the Antique in ruins, and the New
not formed. It is, perhaps, the only country in which the Constructive
principle has not kept pace with the Destructive. The Has Been is
blotted out; the To Be is as the shadow of a far land in a mighty and
perturbed sea.*

* The reader will remember that these remarks were written long
before the last French Revolution, and when the dynasty of Louis
Philippe was generally considered most secure.

Maltravers, who for several years had not examined the progress of
modern literature, looked with mingled feelings of surprise, distaste,
and occasional and most reluctant admiration, on the various works which
the successors of Voltaire and Rousseau have produced, and are pleased
to call the offspring of Truth united to Romance.

Profoundly versed in the mechanism and elements of those masterpieces
of Germany and England, from which the French have borrowed so largely
while pretending to be original, Maltravers was shocked to see the
monsters which these Frankensteins had created from the relics and the
offal of the holiest sepulchres. The head of a giant on the limbs of
a dwarf, incongruous members jumbled together, parts fair and
beautiful,--the whole a hideous distortion!

"It may be possible," said he to De Montaigne, "that these works are
admired and extolled; but how they can be vindicated by the examples
of Shakspeare and Goethe, or even of Byron, who redeemed poor and
melodramatic conceptions with a manly vigour of execution, an energy and
completeness of purpose, that Dryden himself never surpassed, is to me
utterly inconceivable."

"I allow that there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all
these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of
trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new
school is better than eternal imitations of the old. As for critical
vindications of the works themselves, the age that produces the
phenomena is never the age to classify and analyze them. We have had a
deluge, and now new creatures spring from the new soil."

"An excellent simile: the