When any one thinks of French literature, there immediately rises before him a horrid phantasmagoria of repulsive objects--murders, incests, parricides, and every imaginable shape of crime that horror e'er conceived or fancy feigned. He sees the whole efforts of a press, brimful of power and talent, directed against every thing that has hitherto been thought necessary to the safety of society, or the happiness of domestic life--marriage deliberately written down, and proved to be the cause of all the miseries of the social state: and strange to say, in the crusade against matrimony, the sharpest swords and strongest lances are wielded by women. Those women are received into society--men's wives and daughters associate with them--and their books are noticed in the public journals without any allusions to the Association for the prevention of vice, but rather with the praises which, in other times and countries, would have been bestowed on works of genius and virtue. The taste of the English public has certainly deteriorated within the last few years; and popularity, the surest index of the public's likings, though not of the writer's deservings, has attended works of which the great staple has been crime and blackguardism. A certain rude power, a sort of unhealthy energy, has enabled the writer to throw an interest round pickpockets and murderers; and if this interest were legitimately produced, by the exhibition of human passions modified by the circumstances of the actor--if it arose from the development of one real, living, thinking, doing, and suffering man's heart, we could only wonder at the author's choice of such a subject, but we should be ready to acknowledge that he had widened our sphere of knowledge--and made us feel, as we all do, without taking the same credit for it to ourselves that the old blockhead in France does, that being human, we have sympathies with all, even the lowest and wickedest of our kind. But the interest those works excite arises from no such legitimate source--not from the development of our common nature, but from the creation of a new one--from startling contrasts, not of two characters but of one--tenderness, generosity in one page; fierceness and murder in the next. But though our English _tastes_ are so far deteriorated as to tolerate, or even to admire, the records of cruelty and sin now proceeding every day from the press--our English _morals_ would recoil with horror from the deliberate wickedness which forms the great attraction of the French modern school of romance. The very subjects chosen for their novels, by the most popular of their female writers, shows a state of feeling in the authors more dreadful to contemplate than the mere coarse raw-head-and-bloody-bones descriptions of our chroniclers of Newgate. A married woman, the heroine--high in rank, splendid in intellect, radiant in beauty--has for the hero a villain escaped from the hulks. There is no record of his crimes--we are