Of course it may be urged that, in literature as in forms of government, people commonly get what they deserve, and that a public which demands the kind of nutriment alluded to must be an unhealthy and immoral sort of public. It should, however, be borne in mind that there is a much larger portion of the French than of the English public which never reads novels at all. Whether the immense sale commanded by such works as “L’Assommoir” and “Nana” is or is not a sign of national decadence is a question which will not be too hastily answered by any one who remembers the various phases through which literature has passed in other lands, but none need hesitate to say that the effect produced by them upon outside opinion of France and the French has been eminently unfavorable. It is not with impunity that a nation can delight, or seem to delight, in the contemplation of foulness. France, “ce pays de gens aimables, doux, honnêtes, droits, gais, superficiels, pleins de bon cœur,” to quote M. Renan, who knows his countrymen well and does not always flatter them, is becoming more and more regarded as a sink of iniquity, and those who watch the development of her manners, as illustrated by some of her most popular novelists, are beginning to ask themselves whether any good can come out of Nazareth. In England more especially this feeling is gaining ground. If we are little, or not at all, better acquainted with the French people than we were fifty years ago, we are a good deal better acquainted with the French language. We read all the new French books, particularly the new French novels (sometimes we have to keep them under lock and key, and peruse them stealthily after the other members of the family have gone to bed), and it is hardly surprising that we should take our neighbors at what appears to be their own valuation. Englishmen, sober, reticent—a trifle Pharisaical, it may be—cannot pardon writers who take pleasure in stripping poor human nature of its last shred of dignity and exhibiting it to the world under its most revolting aspects. These things are true, the naturalistic school of novel writers say. What then? we may return. Most people know that hideous forms of vice exist; but most people think it is safer and wiser not to talk about them. As for those who do not know, for what conceivable reason should they be told? And so the Englishman, when he takes his walk through the streets of Paris, feels that he would just as soon have nothing to do with the unclean persons who, as he presumes inhabit that city.