eplored the death
and the disappointment of his parents.

THE SCUDERIES.

Bien heureux SCUDERY, dont la fertile plume
Peut tous les mois sans peine enfanter un volume.

Boileau has written this couplet on the Scuderies, the brother and
sister, both famous in their day for composing romances, which they
sometimes extended to ten or twelve volumes. It was the favourite
literature of that period, as novels are now. Our nobility not
unfrequently condescended to translate these voluminous compositions.

The diminutive size of our modern novels is undoubtedly an improvement:
but, in resembling the size of primers, it were to be wished that their
contents had also resembled their inoffensive pages. Our
great-grandmothers were incommoded with overgrown folios; and, instead
of finishing the eventful history of two lovers at one or two sittings,
it was sometimes six months, _including Sundays_, before they could get
quit of their Clelias, their Cyrus's, and Parthenissas.

Mademoiselle Scudery had composed _ninety volumes_! She had even
finished another romance, which she would not give the public, whose
taste, she perceived, no more relished this kind of works. She was one
of those unfortunate authors who, living to more than ninety years of
age, survive their own celebrity.

She had her panegyrists in her day: Menage observes--"What a pleasing
description has Mademoiselle Scudery made, in her Cyrus, of the little
court at Rambouillet! A thousand things in the romances of this learned
lady render them inestimable. She has drawn from the ancients their
happiest passages, and has even improved upon them; like the prince in
the fable, whatever she touches becomes gold. We may read her works with
great profit, if we possess a correct taste, and love instruction. Those
who censure their _length_ only show the littleness of their judgment;
as if Homer and Virgil were to be despised, because many of their books
were filled with episodes and incidents that necessarily retard the
conclusion. It does not require much penetration to observe that _Cyrus_
and _Clelia_ are a species of the _epic_ poem. The epic must embrace a
number of events to suspend the course of the narrative; which, only
taking in a part of the life of the hero, would terminate too soon to
display the skill of the poet. Without this artifice, the charm of
uniting the greater part of the episodes to the principal subject of the
romance would be lost