kles in the sky, remember your Caroline," &c.

"Un Acte de Vertu," from which we have taken Dambergeac's history,
contains him, the husband--a wife--and a brace of lovers; and a great
deal of fun takes place in the manner in which one lover supplants the
other.--Pretty morals truly!

If we examine an author who rejoices in the aristocratic name of le
Comte Horace de Viel-Castel, we find, though with infinitely less wit,
exactly the same intrigues going on. A noble Count lives in the Faubourg
St. Honore, and has a noble Duchess for a mistress: he introduces her
Grace to the Countess his wife. The Countess his wife, in order to
ramener her lord to his conjugal duties, is counselled, by a friend,
TO PRETEND TO TAKE A LOVER: one is found, who, poor fellow! takes the
affair in earnest: climax--duel, death, despair, and what not? In
the "Faubourg St. Germain," another novel by the same writer, which
professes to describe the very pink of that society which Napoleon
dreaded more than Russia, Prussia, and Austria, there is an old husband,
of course; a sentimental young German nobleman, who falls in love with
his wife; and the moral of the piece lies in the showing up of the
conduct of the lady, who is reprehended--not for deceiving her husband
(poor devil!)--but for being a flirt, AND TAKING A SECOND LOVER, to the
utter despair, confusion, and annihilation of the first.

Why, ye gods, do Frenchmen marry at all? Had Pere Enfantin (who, it
is said, has shaved his ambrosial beard, and is now a clerk in a
banking-house) been allowed to carry out his chaste, just, dignified
social scheme, what a deal of marital discomfort might have been
avoided:--would it not be advisable that a great reformer and lawgiver
of our own, Mr. Robert Owen, should be presented at the Tuileries, and
there propound his scheme for the regeneration of France?

He might, perhaps, be spared, for our country is not yet sufficiently
advanced to give such a philosopher fair play. In London, as yet, there
are no blessed Bureaux de Mariage, where an old bachelor may have a
charming young maiden--for his money; or a widow of seventy may buy a
gay young fellow of twenty, for a certain number of bank-billets. If
mariages de convenance take place here (as they will wherever avarice,
and poverty, and desire, and yearning after riches are to be found), at
least, thank God, such unions are not arranged upon a regular organized
SYSTEM: there is a fiction of attachment w