ps his favorite theories, and always succeeds in
interesting when he applies them successively to all the arts. As to the
author's political opinions, he takes no pains to conceal them. His work
is an outcry against equality and universal suffrage. He traces the
apathy of poetic creativeness in France to the sovereignty usurped
everywhere "by the inferior elements of intelligence in the State." He
seems to think, that, as humanity grows older, art falls from its divine
ideal. Of contemporary architecture, he says that it can produce nothing
original save railroad depots and crystal palaces. "A glass architecture
is the only one that fully belongs to our age." Music, the "vaguest and
most sensuous of all the arts," he regards as the art of the present.
The religious worship of the future appears to him "a symphony with a
thousand instruments executed under a dome of glass."

As to the purely literary essays of M. de Laprade, they may be read both
with more pleasure and more profit than those in which he attempts to
discuss the principles of aesthetics. "French Tradition in Literature,"
and "Poetry, and Industrialism," are full of suggestive thoughts, and,
coming in the latter half of the volume, make us forget the pretentious
nature of the first.

* * * * *

M. Gustave Merlet is a more modest opponent of some of the tendencies
of the age. He presents his first book to the public under the title,
"Realisme et Fantaisie,"[J] earnestly and loyally attacking the two
extremes of literature.

[Footnote J: _Le Realisme et la Fantaisie dans la Litterature_. Par
Gustave Merlet. Paris: Didier et Cie. 12mo. pp. 431.]

Two styles of writing, diametrically opposed in every particular, have
of late years flourished in the lighter productions of France. Some
there are who would seek to incarnate in letters Nature as it is,
without adornings, without ideal additions. The cry of the upholders
of this doctrine is: Truth in art, war against the freaks of the
imagination that colors all in unreal tints. The writers who have
adopted such sentiments have been termed "Realists," much to their
dissatisfaction. Balzac was the greatest of them. Champfleury may be
called the most strenuous supporter of the system. There is a certain
force, a false air of truth, in this daguerreotype process of writing,
that seduces at first sight. When a man of some genius, as Gustave
Flaubert in "Madame Bovary," undertakes to p