poisoned in the later days of the _ancien regime_, forcibly suppressed under the Republic, and only officially licensed by the Napoleonic system. In _Les Martyrs_ it has even a certain "grace of congruity,"[28] but in regard to _Les Natchez_, with which we are for the moment concerned, almost enough (with an example or two to come presently) has been said about it. The book, as a whole, suffers, unquestionably and considerably, from the results of two defects in its author. He was not born, as Scott was a little later, to get the historical novel at last into full life and activity; and it would not be unfair to question whether he was a born novelist at all, though he had not a few of the qualifications necessary to the kind, and exercised, coming as and when he did, an immense influence upon it. The subject is too obscure. Its only original _vates_, Charlevoix, though always a respectable name to persons of some acquaintance with literature and history, has never been much more, either in France or in England. The French, unluckily for themselves, never took much interest in their transatlantic possessions while they had them; and their dealings with the Indians then, and ours afterwards, and those of the Americans since, have never been exactly of the kind that give on both sides a subject such as may be found in all mediaeval and most Renaissance matters; in the Fronde; in the English Civil War; in the great struggles of France and England from 1688 to 1815; in the Jacobite risings; in La Vendee; and in other historical periods and provinces too many to mention. On the other hand, the abstract "noble savage" is a faded object of exhausted _engouement_, than which there are few things less exhilarating. The Indian _ingenu_ (a very different one from Voltaire's) Outougamiz and his _ingenue_ Mila are rather nice; but Celuta (the ill-fated girl who loves Rene and whom he marries, because in a sort of way he cannot help it) is an eminent example of that helpless kind of quiet misfortune the unprofitableness of which Mr. Arnold has confessed and registered in a famous passage. Chactas maintains a respectable amount of interest, and his visit to the court of Louis XIV. takes very fair rank among a well-known group of things of which it is not Philistine to speak as old-fashioned, because they never possessed much attraction, except as being new- or regular-fashioned. But the villain Ondoure has almost as little of the fire of Hell as of that of Heaven, and his paramour and accomplice Akansie carries very little "conviction" with her. In short, the merit of the book, besides the faint one of having been the original framework of _Atala_ and _Rene_, is almost limited to its atmosphere, and the alterative qualities thereof--things now in a way ancient history--requiring even a considerable dose of the not-universally-possessed historic sense to discern and appreciate them.