icture of
what is dismal enough in reality. In fact, we are afraid that Mr. Hare
has not exactly the artist's eye, and cannot easily admire a scene in
which he is not physically comfortable. But he has rich and heart-warm
descriptions of the Alhambra, the Escorial, and the ruins of Poblet
near Tarragona, where an order of patrician monks lived in incredible
luxury until a time within present memory, when they were scattered by
a tumult and their sculptured home crushed into dry and haggard ruin.
This book cannot compare with his _Walks in Rome_, which was the
careful record of a familiar and a resident; but it is the result of
a very lively curiosity and the record of a mind evidently stored with
history and romance. Excepting Colonel Hay's inimitable _Castilian
Days_, it is the best recent book about the country which it skims
over.

Marie Derville: A Story of a French Boarding-school. From
the French of Madame Guizot de Witt, by Mary G. Wells.
Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.

French fiction when playing off innocence or when intended for
uncontaminated ears attains a blank intensity of virtue that our own
literature cannot hope to rival. The French "juvenile" still guards
that beauteous ignorance of slang or of other small vice which the
American schoolboy regards as poverty of resource or incapacity, and
which he has put off with his frocks and his _Parent's Assistant_ and
his _Sanford and Merton_. But _Marie Derville_, when its accent of
Berquin is allowed for, is a varied and interesting tale, affording
many a glimpse into that country guarded about with such jealous
walls--middle-class childhood in France. Marie is the child of a
sea-captain who goes to China, disappears for many years, and comes
back at last, after a narrow escape from massacre, saying, "How
strange it was to find myself on the eve of becoming a martyr--to
die for the Christian religion when one is so poor a Christian as
I!" His wife and two or three of Marie's grandparents meantime unite
to conduct a boarding-school on the sea-shore, the history of which
enterprise forms the bulk of the tale. Here the American reader learns
with surprise that the French little girl, who is never actually seen
otherwise than perfect and doll-like, is really subject in private
to a few of the faults common to Miss Edgeworth's heroines, such as
selfishness, gluttony and laziness. But the story of the school is
on the whole sunshiny and prospero