le productions of the
present French school. Without encouraging, we will venture to direct,
the prevailing appetite, by pointing the attention of Maga's
readers--whose name is Legion--to the writings of an author not the best
known, but certainly one of the most accomplished, of his class. In
France, his reputation stands very high; and if in England it is not yet
equally well-established, it must be attributed to his having written
little, and to the absence of that charlatanry and egotism which has
brought other cultivators of the Belles Lettres into such universal
notice here and on the Continent. M. Dumas, for instance, even had his
writings, and those of the numerous staff of literary aid-de-camps to
whose bairns he stands godfather, been less diverting, would still have
commanded readers in every country where French is understood, and which
the post from Paris reaches. The man is his own advertisement; his
eccentricities are worth, at a moderate estimate, a dozen advertising
vans, a daily paragraph in a score of newspapers, and a cartload of
posters. He is a practical puff, an incarnate stimulant to popular
curiosity. Let the public appetite for his weekly volumes flag ever so
little, and forthwith he puts in practice, for the renewal of his vogue,
devices so ingenious, that proceeding from any but the privileged
monarch of romance-writers, they would be looked upon as the tricks of a
lunatic. One day in a court of assizes, the next at that of a king, on
the morrow before a civil tribunal, the illustrious inheritor of the
marquisate of La Pailleterie parades his graces, jogs the world's memory
as to the fact of his existence, and bids it read his books and bow
before his footstool. To-day he is on the Corso, to-morrow on the sunny
banks of Rhine; the next day he peeps into Etna's crater, or gasps
beneath the brazen sky of shadeless Syria. Now we hear of him in Spanish
palaces, figuring at royal weddings, and adding one more to the
countless ribbon-ends that already grace his button-hole; and scarcely
has our admiration subsided, when a Mediterranean breeze murmurs sweet
tidings of his presence on African shores, taking his coffee with Beys,
commanding war-steamers, riving the captive's fetters, and rivetting his
claims on his country's gratitude. Wherever he goes, he stands, a modern
Gulliver, pre-eminent in moral giantship, amidst surrounding pigmies,
who

"Walk under his huge legs, and peep about To find