s" on the title-page of a book of fiction, was, to the work so
inscribed, virtual sentence of exclusion from respectable library and
decent drawing-room this side the Channel. It was the foul-bill of
health, the signal of a moral quarantine, interminable and hopeless of
pratique. French novels came to England and were read; but the arrivals
were comparatively rare, the readers scarce more numerous; whilst by the
masses they were condemned as contraband and dangerous merchandise, and
eschewed as religiously as Lyons silks by the humane, when Spitalfields
are starving. The wilful and wicked minority who took pleasure in their
pungent pages, did so clandestinely, and with precaution. In
carefully-locked desk, or on topmost shelf of bookcase, lurking behind
an honourable front-rank of history and essay, the disreputable
literature was bestowed. Nor was its reception more openly hospitable
when arrayed in English garb. Translators there were, who strove to
render into the manly, wholesome Anglo-Saxon tongue, the produce--witty,
frivolous, prurient, and amusing--of Gallic imagination. But either the
translations shared the interdict incurred by the objectionable
originals, or the plan adopted to obtain their partial acceptance,
destroyed pith and point. Letters from plague-ridden shores are fitted
for the perusal of the uninfected by fumigation and other mysterious
processes. They reach us reeking with aromatics and defaced by
perforations, intended doubtless to favour the escape of the demon of
pestilence bodily imprisoned within their folds. But their written
contents are uninjured by the salutary operation; the words of
affection, the combinations of commerce, the politician's plans, are
still to be read upon their stained and punctured surface. Not so with
the French novels that underwent fumigation and curtailment at the hands
of decorous translators. The knife that extirpated the gangrene,
unavoidably trenched upon the healthy flesh: in rooting up the abundant
tares, the scanty grain was shaken out, and chaff and straw alone
remained.

We speak of times past, although still recent; glance we at the present,
and, Heaven help us! what a change is here! Tempora mutantur et
_libri_--or it were perhaps more proper to say, _et lectores_. With
headlong velocity, one extreme has been abandoned for its opposite. The
denounced of yesterday is the favoured of to-day; the scouted is now the
cherished; the rejected stone has a lofty