e
reader who comes to them from Mr. Dasent's admirably written
Introductory Essay.

The book is one which we can heartily recommend to all who are
interested in popular traditions for their own sake, or in their
ethnological relations.

* * * * *

_Love_, From the French of M.J. Michelet. Translated from the Fourth
Paris Edition, by J.W. Palmer, M.D., Author of "The New and The Old,"
"Up and Down the Irawaddi," etc.

M. Michelet perhaps longs, like Anacreon, to tell the story of the
Atrides and of Cadmus, but here we find him singing only of Love. It is
a surprise to us that the historian should have chosen this
subject;--the book itself is another surprise. It starts from a few
facts which it borrows from science, and out of them it builds a
poem,--a drama in five acts called _Books_, to disguise them. Two
characters figure chiefly on the stage,--a husband and a wife. The unity
of time is not very strictly kept, for the pair are traced from youth to
age, and even beyond their mortal years. Moral reflections and
occasional rhapsodies are wreathed about this physiological and
psychological love-drama.

Here, then, is a book with the most taking word in the language for its
title, and one of the most distinguished personages in contemporary
literature for its author. It has been extensively read in France, and
is attracting general notice in this country. Opinions are divided among
us concerning it; it is extravagantly praised, and hastily condemned.

On the whole, the book is destined, we believe, to do much more good
than harm. Admit all its high-flown sentimentalism to be
half-unconscious affectation, such as we pardon in writers of the Great
Nation,--admit that the author is wild and fanciful in many of his
statements, that he talks of a state of society of which it has been
said that the law is that a man shall hate his neighbor and love his
neighbor's wife,--admit all this and what lesser faults may be added to
them, its great lessons are on the side of humanity, and especially of
justice to woman, founded on a study of her organic and spiritual
limitations.

_Woman is an invalid_. This is the first axiom, out of which flow the
precepts of care, bodily and mental, of tenderness, of consideration,
with which the book abounds. To show this, M. Michelet has recourse to
the investigations of the physiologists who during the present century
have studied the special conditions whic