After an unsuccessful attempt to make a home in America, Mrs. Trollope returned to England, with the world to begin again, a husband incapacitated for work by ill-health, and children who needed aid, and were too young to give any. In such circumstances many would have appealed to the sympathy of the public, but Mrs. Trollope was a courageous woman, and preferred to rely upon her own resources. She followed her first book, the success of which was immediate and very great, by a novel entitled "The Refugee in America," in which the plot is ill-constructed, and the characters are crudely drawn, but the writer's caustic humour lends animation to the page. "The Abbess," a novel, was her third effort; and then, in the following year, came another record of travel, "Belgium and Western Germany in 1833." Her Conservative instincts found less to offend them in Continental than in American society, and her sketches, therefore, while not less vivid, are much better humoured than in her American book. Some offences against the "minor morals" incur her condemnation; but the evil which most provokes her is the incessant tobacco smoking of the Germans, against which she protests as vehemently as did James I. in his celebrated "Counterblast." Three years later she produced her "Paris and the Parisians," of which M. Cortambret speaks as "crowning her reputation," and as receiving almost as warm a welcome in France as in England. The character, customs, and literature of the French furnish the theme of a series of letters, in which the clever and vivacious writer never fails to charm even those whom she does not convince. It is curious to read this book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,--or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?--which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great doctrines and generous ideas. Mrs. Trollope records as an historical and noteworthy phrase, much in vogue in 1835, "Young France," and describes it as one of those cabalistic formulae which assume to give expression to a grand, terrible, sublime, and volcanic idea. What shall we say now-a-days of these two brief monosyllabic words, in which the strong generation of the Revolution and the First Empire reposed so haughty a confidence? What shall we say of them to a disillusionized youth, who no longer believe in anything, and know neither faith nor culture, except in one thing, money--for whom Sport and the Bourse have replaced the literature which strengthened and developed the faculties, and the politics which made men citizens?