even to him, rather strong. But the consequences he apprehends are of a peculiar kind. What he fears is, that he shall not be invited to the next court ball. "See," says HadjiStavros, in confidence to the German, "this is a Greek of today; I am a Greek of yesterday; and the newspapers say we are in a state of progress."

By the side of the description of the King of the Mountains occurs the more purely farcical description of the English ladies, Mrs. Barley and Mary Ann. They are very like the usual English people of French comedy, the Anglais pour rire, who give some delight to Frenchmen, and such unbounded amasement to Englishmen, in the minor theatres of Paris. The mamma confines her observations to repeating that she and her daughter are Englishwomen, and that they are not to be so treated; that she will write to Lord Palmerston and the Times, and have the Mediterranean fleet despatched to Athens at once, unless she has every thing her own way. She writes a letter to her brother about the money to be paid for her ransom, and ends by saying, "It is monstrous that two Englishwomen, citizens of the greatest empire of the world, should be reduced to eat their roast meat without mustard and pickles, and to drink plain water like the commonest kind of fish." This purely farcical element in M. About's books does not make them less amusing, but it brings them to a lower level. We see that, in order to produce an effect, he is satisfied to deal out a very hackneyed and exaggerated kind of wit to his minor characters. These jokes in a French novel are about as witty as if a Frenchman in an English novel were always asking for frogs. We cannot help laughing at Mrs. Barley; but the difference between the wit involved in portraying an English lady always boasting of her country, and always demanding mustard and pickles, and the wit that shines through the elaborate creation of Hadji-Stavros is immense, and makes us feel that M. About, if he often works with very fine tools, also often works with very coarse ones.

Of the other comic novels of M. About, the best and most amusing is, we think, Trente et Quarante. There is less brilliancy in the writing than in the Roi des Montagnes, and there is none of the local colouring and truthfulness of description in the midst of exaggeration; but there is almost, if not quite, as much skilfulness in handling the improbable, and in keeping the reader in an imaginary world so like the real as to produce the illusion that, after all, the story is not so unnatural. In Trente et Quarante there is a Captain Bitterlin, a remnant of the grande armée, a thoroughly pig-headed, parvenu, vain, prejudiced old soldier. Like most old soldiers in romance, the

Captain has an only daughter, lovely, romantic, and named An Italian refugee sees her and falls in love with her at first sight, and she returns his passion. But as her father considers all women deserve distrust, and require to be kept in the closest imprisonment, it is hard for the lovers to meet. The young lady's health fails, as the health of most young ladies would fail who were locked up for a fortnight at a time, with a lover outside the door and a suspicious father inside. The old officer determines to take his daughter on a little tour, and they set off for Switzerland. The lover manages to ascertain the time of starting, and takes a place in the same carriage. They journey on, and he goes with them. The Captain has no suspicion that this young Italian is his daughter's lover; but he gets dreadfully bored with the ardent affection the stranger shows for him, and the determination with which he sticks to the same route. They at last approach Baden, and the young Italian announces his intention of going there. The Captain breaks out into a violent anathema against gambling in the presence of a large party. They laugh at him, and tell him that if he went to Baden, he would gamble too. He indignantly denies this, and offers to go to Baden, to show the strength of his powers of resistance. The Italian goes first, and has two or three nights of varied fortune. He is sitting at the table playing trente et quarante, with twenty francs before him, which was all he had left, when suddenly he sees M. Bitterlin. In terror lest the father of Emma should set him down as a gambler, he gets up from his seat, and leaves his francs behind him. M. Bitterlin sees them, and thinks that, at least, he ought to return them to the young stranger, bore and gambler as he is. But just as he is about to take them up, he finds twenty more francs added to them. The Italian had left them staked on the black, and the black has won. Not understanding what has happened, M. Bitterlin leaves the forty francs where they are, and again black wins. A strange run of luck soon makes these francs mount to so large a pile that they exceed what is allowed to be staked. M. Bitterlin is requested to take from the heap six thousand francs, which is the maximum stake. He complies, and half dazzled by the marvel of such a sudden influx of wealth, and half interested in the game, he stakes on and on until he breaks the bank, and rises with a hundred and twenty thousand francs in his pocket. The lover hears what has happened, and rushes off by the next train to Paris. The old captain is in agony until he can restore this large sum to the rightful owner, and hurries after him. After a long search, finds the Italian, who flatly refuses to take the money. strong altercation ensues, and at last the Italian says that he

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can see only one way in which the affair can be arranged, and that is, that he should marry Emma, and thus there would be no question as to the ownership of the money; but he entirely declines to accept her. The captain is furious, and asks him what he means by refusing his daughter. The Italian declines any explanation, and a duel is arranged. On the ground, one of the seconds of the Italian steps forward and says, that if no terms can be agreed on, the duel must proceed; but that the honour of Mdlle. Bitterlin is compromised, and that, as the Italian's death would not clear her, it would be much better he should behave as a man of honour and agree to marry her, instead of fighting her father. After much pretended hesitation, he agrees; and then all the seconds declare that the captain is bound by the arrangement, and that he must give his daughter to the Italian. He assents at last, under the hope that the worst punishment he can inflict on his adversary is to make him marry against his will, and because he is attracted by the pleasure of forcing a husband on his daughter against her will. Thus the young people get their own way, and trente et quarante lands them in a happy marriage.

A story of this kind bears exactly the same relation to real life as the old comedy of the days of Charles II. The incidents are so droll, and the characters all seem so sure of themselves, and so convinced that they can do what they represent themselves as doing, that we allow them to have their fling, and keep our doubts as to their possibility and respectability to ourselves. We no more think of criticising the principles and conduct of this young Italian than of being severe on the Mirabels and Wildloves of the Restoration drama. In real life this Italian would have played a very scurvy trick on a man who meant to act honourably by him, and have started on his married life with the pleasant knowledge that he had won his wife by getting several strangers to declare her honour compromised; but the whole thing is too absurd and extravagant to let such criticism appear any thing but inapplicable prudery. The machinery by which this air of false and exceptional probability is created is exactly the same in the old comedy and in M. About's story. The secret of it all is to give very minute details of each scene that is presented, and boldly to leap over all the links that ought to connect one scene with another. While we attend to the proceedings of Captain Bitterlin at any one point of his career, he seems to be doing only what is natural, as every thing is described so easily and consecutively that there appears hardly any thing else for him to do but what he does; and we are so much amused with him, that we do not care to wait and ask ourselves how he moves from one point to another. There is

nothing instructive or elevating in such reading, but we are kept in a state of great merriment throughout the volume; and as novels are written to amuse, they must be held to succeed when they amuse, provided that the character of the amusement is not positively wrong. It deserves to be noticed in M. About's favour that here the comparison of his story with the old dramatists is to his advantage; for the reckless intrigues of the Restoration heroes are much more condemnable than the artifice of a lover to decoy a selfish and prejudiced father into giving his daughter to a man whom she loves. There is also much less connection between the imaginary scene and the conduct in real life of those who study it. A spectator of Farquhar may be induced to imitate Mirabel in a very matter-of-fact way, but no reader of M. About's book would think of getting an intended father-in-law to break the bank at Baden.

Germaine is, we think, the least pleasing of all M. About's stories. It has the great fault of containing elements too tragic for the style in which it is written, and it probes the plague-spots of society too deeply. The story turns on the disappointment undergone by a certain Madame Chermidy in her efforts to legitimate her son, who is the offspring of an intrigue with a Neapolitan count. She hits on the amazing artifice of getting her lover to marry a girl in the last stage of consumption, and of having it declared in the act of marriage that the boy is the child of this young lady. Germaine, who is the victim, consents on condition of a large sum being paid to her parents to relieve them from the miserable poverty into which the folly of the Duke, her father, brought them. The count marries Germaine and takes her to Corfu, where the warm climate does her so much good, that Madame Chermidy fears that her plot will be turned against her, and that she will have only succeeded in giving herself a rival in the count's affections. To make matters safe, she sends a forçat to hasten Germaine's end by poison. But he gives Germaine minute doses of arsenic, and this is the very best remedy she could have; so that the more she is poisoned the better she is. Irritated by this new failure, Madame Chermidy comes herself to Corfu; and there, quarrelling with her forçat, she is assassinated by him. This is much too painful a subject for a light story, and comic writing is out of place when it is employed to lighten the horrors of poisoning, poniarding, and adultery. The difficulty of getting a plot which shall be interesting and exciting, and yet not too serious and horrible for a pleasant, gossiping treatment, is very considerable when the story is to be carried to any length. When the story is short, it is sufficient to take one little foible or one curious coincidence as the theme. The volume called Mariages de Paris, in which M. About has col

lected a series of feuilletons originally published in the Moniteur, is accordingly much better reading than Germaine. One of these stories, La Mère de la Marquise, may serve as an example. A bourgeoise is intensely anxious to get a footing in the Faubourg St. Germain, and looks out for a noble husband for her daughter as the readiest means of effecting her purpose. A live marquis comes in her way, and she books him. She takes him down to her country place, and the marriage is celebrated; but on the wedding-night she learns that he hates Paris, and intends to live in the country. Determined not to be frustrated, she decoys the bride into a carriage, and elopes with her to Paris. The story then turns on the arts and the resolution with which she keeps the wife from the husband, and of the determination of the marquis not to yield. He wins in the long-run; for one day the mamma makes too long a call, and when she gets back she finds that her son-in-law has run off with her daughter. This is a very slight framework for a story; but the tale has the great merit of resting on a foible and not a crime, and so, as it is well told, it is a very agreeable provision for an idle half-hour.

Comic novelists, we may remark in passing, naturally select exaggerated and special types among their countrymen as the best material for fun, and thus often give the impression that the faults and failings which they and their countrymen most laugh at in others prevail widely among themselves. If there are two failings which are more widely attributed to the English than all others, they are want of courtesy and tuft-hunting. We Englishmen are always ready to confess our faults from a sublime feeling that no confession of faults can reduce us to the level of the rest of the world; and we may therefore say openly that we think the accusation is true, and that John Bull on his travels does sometimes treat the natives like the vermin he considers them, and that he dearly loves a lord. But in no English novel, nor in any representation of English people, have we ever met with the description of a traveller so brutal, so insolent, and so domineering, as Captain Bitterlin, or any lover of rank so frantically anxious to be noticed by aristocrats as the mother of the marchioness. Either they do these things more thoroughly in France, or M. About must have been drawing on his imagination, to the great disadvantage and discredit of his countrymen and country women. We suspect that he is only painting what he has often seen in real life, and that Captain Bitterlin and the mother of the marchioness have very many counterparts within a mile of the Louvre. It does not therefore follow that we ought to consider the French discourteous and slavishly fond of rank; it only follows that the types set up by comic novelists should not be too widely generalised, and that we should be