dge it with impartiality. The overthrow of its military power did
less to lower the nation in the eyes of foreigners than its subsequent
course has done to raise it; and now that it is fairly entering on
a new career in a mood and under auspices that cannot but awaken
the strongest hopes, we have probably seen the last of the typical
Frenchman of the Anglo-Saxon imagination--a being capable of the most
frantic actions and incapable of a serious thought, a compound of
frivolity and ferocity, the fit subject and facile instrument of a
despotism that knew how to gratify his vanity while restraining his
mad ebullitions. Among the excuses that might be offered for such
misconceptions is the dearth of information in the literature of
France itself in regard to the life and habits of the general mass of
the population. In these days it is to novels that we chiefly go
for pictures of character and manners, and French novels are almost
exclusively devoted to pictures of Parisian manners. Balzac, it
is true, has given us delineations of provincial life; but the
delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the problems
of real life, and even if we could always accept the portraitures they
give us as undistorted, they generally presuppose a knowledge on the
part of the reader on those points on which the foreigner is most apt
to be ignorant. In any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer
who both understands our lack and is able to supply it, and these
qualifications, with others scarcely less essential, Mr. Hamerton
has brought to his task. He has thoroughly familiarized himself with
French usages, but he has not lost his sense of the difference between
them and those of his own land, and of the consequent necessity for
explaining as well as describing, and of tracing peculiarities to
their source. If he is free from the common prejudices of the foreign
observer, he has not adopted the passions or the partialities of the
native. He can write with fairness of different classes and factions,
and can discriminate between ordinary impulses and actions and those
that have their origin in strong excitement. Finally, he neither
overloads us with facts and statistics nor seeks to amuse us with
fancies or caricatures. He is always sober and always agreeable.

The matter of this volume was collected during a fixed residence of
several years in one of the central provinces of France. No doubt Mr.
Hamerton had a previous acqua