s--round the world and back again,
Where the flaw shall fail us or the trades drive down:
Plain-sail--storm-sail--lay your board and tack again--
And all to bring a cargo into London Town!_

MONSIEUR DE BLOWITZ.

BY W. MORTON FULLERTON.

When Taine died, people whom his books had interested felt a sudden
longing to say all that they had been thinking about his famous theory
of the "_milieu_." Taine had been, with Renan, the chief literary
medium of thought in France; but while Renan was altogether useful,
caring as he did more for his method than for its results, Taine, with
his imperative and beautiful consistency, imposed on the younger
generation a habit of applying the principle of environment which was
somewhat lacking in criticism. No one but an artist of his surprising
agility and perceptions could have made such a method so universal.
The French wilfully attain clearness by defect of vision, but this is
the same thing as saying that they attain plausibility at the expense
of truth. Taine died, and the thing we lacked courage to say to his
face we have all been saying now that he is safe and irresponsible, as
well as unresponsive, in the earth.

An inevitable way, undoubtedly, to be assured of the insufficiency of
Taine's method is to read Taine's books; and the first book of all,
the "Essay on La Fontaine," is, I may insert the observation, as
conclusive as the last in this respect. But in order to obtain the
conviction that what the critic can get to know of the environing
conditions of any product, human or other, does not explain that
product, one needs not go to Taine's books; one has only to apply it
to the things and people one knows best. The result will be
unsatisfactory. The critic will find a thousand elements in that
particular product's individuality thus left unexplained; in a word,
the theory is one natural, no doubt, to the Olympians, who see all
things; but impracticable for men who, even at their best, see only
very little. Apply it to yourself; apply it to your friends. Apply it
to the person of whom I am going to speak, to M. de Blowitz, the Paris
correspondent of an English newspaper, the "Times." The act will
result in a failure, a scientific failure, whatever the artistic
success. Yet M. de Blowitz is a very remarkable human fact; and that a
philosophic or critical method cannot be applied to him with triumph,
for both him and the method--is this not of itself a consi