it instead of Shakespeare, Goneril and Regan would still have been terrible, while the Paris dames of fashion are merely loathsome. What is the explanation of the difference? Partly, I suppose, it arises from the comparative intellectual stature of the two sets of women. Strong natures and weak may be equally wicked. The strong are interesting, because they have daring and force. You fear them as you fear panthers and tigers. You hate, but you admire. M. Balzac's heroines have no intellectual nature at all. They are female swine out of Circe's sty; as selfish, as unscrupulous as any daughter of Adam could conveniently be, but soft, and corrupt, and cowardly, and sensual; so base and low that it would be a compliment to call them devils. I object to being brought into the society of people in a book whom I would shut my eyes rather than see in real life. Goneril and Regan would be worth looking at in a cage in the Zoological Gardens. One would have no curiosity to stare at a couple of dames caught out of Coventry Street or the Quadrant. From Shakespeare to Balzac, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, we have been progressing to considerable purpose. If the state of literature remains as it has hitherto been, the measure of our moral condition, Europe has been going ahead with a vengeance. I put out the taste of “_Le Père Goriot_” with “Persuasion.” Afterwards I found a book really worth reading, with the uninviting title of “Adventures in Sport and War,” the author of it a young Marquis de Compiègne, a ruined representative of the old French _noblesse_, who appears first as a penniless adventurer seeking his fortune in America as a birdstuffer, and tempted by an advertisement into the swamps of Florida in search of specimens, a beggarly experience, yet told with _naïveté_ and simplicity, truth and honor surviving by the side of absolute helplessness. Afterwards we find him in France again, fighting as a private in the war with Germany, and taken prisoner at Sedan; and again in the campaign against the Commune, at the taking of Paris, and the burning of the Tuileries—a tragic picture, drawn, too, with entire unconsciousness of the condition to which Balzac, Madame Sand, and the rest of the fraternity had dragged down the French nation.—_Longman's Magazine._ * * * * *