Frenchman is stripped of his bank-notes, and left in the dead of night in the middle of a field. In vain, at daybreak, does he seek a shepherd to question, because, as M. Méry testifies, English peasants do not inhabit the fields; shepherds are scarcely known in the country; and the only one he, the aforesaid Méry, ever beheld, during his extensive rambles in England, was a well-dressed young gentleman, with gloves on, reading the _Morning Chronicle_ under a tree. Then we have a thieves' orgie, where the liquors in demand are claret and _absinthe_, nothing less--M. Méry not condescending to the gin, so much abused by his contemporaries. And, finally, a murder having been committed, its circumstances are investigated on the spot, by a _Queen's proctor_, assisted by two policemen, a barmaid, and a physician. We might multiply these literary curiosities; but we have given enough to prove their author's intimate acquaintance with the country about which he so agreeably writes. It is related of M. Méry's friend Dumas, that he once resolved on a visit to London, posted to Boulogne, steamed to London bridge, and reached St Paul's, but there turned back, anathematising fog and sea-coal, and never stopped till he found himself in the Chaussée d'Antin. Without vouching for the truth of this tale, we must admit its probability when told of the eccentric Alexander. Mr Méry's knowledge of this country is just what he might have obtained by an hour's conversation with his friend, upon the return of the latter from his journey to St Paul's. But it is a crying sin of French writers, when they get upon foreign ground, that, in their anxiety to give to their books a tinge characteristic of the country, (_couleur locale_ they call it,) they outstrip the limits assigned to them by their real knowledge of the land and its inhabitants, and, meaning to be effective, become simply ridiculous. And England is the country, of all others, whose ways they apparently have most difficulty in rightly comprehending. On a more southern soil they are less apt to run into absurdities, but sin chiefly on the side of overcolouring. This may be alleged, although to no violent extent, of a pleasant little romance by Paul de Musset, _La Chèvre Jaune_--The Yellow Goat--intended as an illustration of Sicilian life, particularly amongst the lower orders. The hero of the tale is a precocious peasant boy, dwelling in the mountains with his mother--a fierce old lady who owns a rifle, and detests the Neapolitans. This boy, who herds goats, pets one of them, and trains her to dance; by which means, and by his own good mien, he gains the affections of a notary's daughter, whose papa, disapproving of the attachment, has the peasant taken up on a false accusation of theft. The boy escapes, turns bandit, and is accompanied in his forays and ambuscades by his goat, who dances tarantellas on the mountain-tops, and plays so many queer antics that she finally is held uncanny, and