aulette, the sabredash, and the tricolor.

We have surely wasted ink enough upon this theme. In common with
ourselves, the reader will regard with due commiseration, a
manifestation of wicked folly, which will do no harm only because it
comes in an age not ripe for bloodshed, or happily too humanized for
unprovoked, gratuitous warfare; and because the French people
themselves, under a politic king and a peace-seeking ministry, have
learned a little to regard the blessings of undisturbed domestic
quietness. We quit the main subject of M. Michelet's book, to draw
attention to a few insulated passages worthy of the better days of the
author, and certainly out of place in the present volume. It were not
possible for M. Michelet to write four hundred pages that should not,
here and there, give evidence of his great genius--his general common
sense, and his touching sympathy for the suffering and the oppressed.
There are passages in the work under consideration that have universal
interest, and claim universal attention; his appeals on behalf of
children and women, the most neglected and oppressed of the community,
let them be found where they may, in England or in France, in Europe or
in Asia, are instinct with truthfulness and honest vigour; his
vindication of the _mission_ of the child, philosophical and just, is
beaming with the light that burns so steadily and clearly in the poems
of our own Wordsworth, which have especial reference to the holy
character of the "Father of the Man."

It is in one of the insulated passages of which we speak, that M.
Michelet bitterly and very sensibly complains of the exclusive regard
which modern romance writers have shown for the prisons and kennels, the
monsters and thieves of civilized societies; of the disposition every
where exhibited to descend rather than ascend for the choice of a
subject, or the selection of a hero. We have felt the inconvenience of
the same sickly taste in this country, and can understand the
complainings over productions similar to that of _The Mysteries of
Paris_, whilst we remember our own inferior and not less baneful _Dick
Turpins_ and _Jack Sheppards_. Hurtful to the morals of a nation, these
productions are equally unjust to the national character. We have drawn
our estimate of the present literature of France from what we have seen
and heard of her least healthy writers. As well might the novels of Mr
Ainsworth, or the miserable burlesques of Mr Albert