se with every new volume of his
"Course of Dramatic Literature." We have now the fourth volume.[H] "A
Course of Dramatic Literature";--it is more. It is the history of the
expression of Passion among the ancients and the moderns, by no means
confined to the drama. The present volume, as well as the third,
published several years ago, is devoted to the analysis of Love as
expressed in different ages and by different nations, under the two
divisions of _L'Amour Ingenu_ and _L'Amour Conjugal_.

[Footnote H: _Cours de Litterature Dramatique._ Par Saint-Marc Girardin,
de l'Academie Francaise, Professeur a la Faculte des Lettres de Paris,
Membre du Conseil Imperial de l'Instruction Publique. Tome IV. Paris:
Charpentier.]

The first he had studied in the authors of antiquity in his third
volume, beginning in this with the episode of Cupid and Psyche in
Apuleius; then following up, through the moderns, the expression
of Ingenuous Love in Corneille, La Fontaine, Sedaine, Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, Milton, Gessner, Voss, Andre Chenier, and Chateaubriand.
For the last he finds more blame than praise. Indeed, this
effect-seeking writer, with all his genius, seemed less fitted than any
one to express the natural and spontaneous. His Atala, who charms us so
at the first reading, deals in studied emotions. As to Rene, his is the
vain sentimentality parading its own impotency for higher feelings,
a virtual boasting of want of soul,--the sickly dissatisfaction of
Werther, without his passion for an excuse. M. Saint-Marc Girardin then
follows up his subject through later authors, even in Madame George
Sand and in Madame Emile de Girardin. He is particularly severe upon
Lamartine, that poet "who for more than thirty years seemed best to
express love as our century understands it," but who in Raphael
and Graziella destroyed, by disclosing too much, the power of his
"Meditations Poetiques."

On Conjugal Love the classic models are first consulted,--Oenone,
Evadne, Medea,--these characters being followed through the delineation
of modern dramatists. We know of no more exquisite criticism than
the pages devoted to Griseldis. Analyzing the accounts of Boccaccio,
Chaucer, and Perault, our author concludes with the play of "Munck
Bellinghausen." The last chapters, on "Love and Duty," are among the
most eloquently written in the volume. For style, M. Saint-Marc Girardin
is second to no living author of France.

In this course we find an evid