y come forth from slime and mud,--fetid and
crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the
New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and
creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a
Corneille should ever spawn forth a -----! And with these rickety and
drivelling abortions--all having followers and adulators--your Public
can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the
day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can
bear to hear ----- proclaimed a sublime genius in the same circles which
sneer down Voltaire!"

Voltaire is out of fashion in France, but Rousseau still maintains his
influence, and boasts his imitators. Rousseau was the worse man of the
two; perhaps he was also the more dangerous writer. But his reputation
is more durable, and sinks deeper into the heart of his nation; and
the danger of his unstable and capricious doctrines has passed away.
In Voltaire we behold the fate of all writers purely destructive;
their uses cease with the evils they denounce. But Rousseau sought to
construct as well as to destroy; and though nothing could well be more
absurd than his constructions, still man loves to look back and see even
delusive images--castles in the air--reared above the waste where
cities have been. Rather than leave even a burial-ground to solitude, we
populate it with ghosts.

By degrees, however, as he mastered all the features of the French
literature, Maltravers become more tolerant of the present defects,
and more hopeful of the future results. He saw in one respect that that
literature carried with it its own ultimate redemption.

Its general characteristic--contradistinguished from the literature of
the old French classic school--is to take the _heart_ for its study; to
bring the passions and feelings into action, and let the Within have its
record and history as well as the Without. In all this our contemplative
analyst began to allow that the French were not far wrong when they
contended that Shakspeare made the fountain of their inspiration,--a
fountain which the majority of our later English Fictionists have
neglected. It is not by a story woven of interesting incidents, relieved
by delineations of the externals and surface of character, humorous
phraseology, and every-day ethics, that Fiction achieves its grandest
ends.

In the French literature, thus characterized, there is