--then, for another instance, to pass over Boileau and not bring forward from him even so much as the following characteristic epigram, wherein this wit and satirist pays his sarcastic respects to that same poet Cotin whom (pp. 81 ff.) we showed Moliere mocking under the name of "Trissotin" (here we must do our own translating): In vain, with thousandfold abuse, My foes, through all their works diffuse, Have thought to make me shocking to mankind; Cotin, to bring my style to shame, Has played a much more easy game, He has his verses to my pen assigned-- to achieve, we say, these abstinences, and abstinences such as these, was a problem hard indeed to solve. The result of all is before the reader; and, good or bad, it is, we are bound to confess, the very best that, within the given limits, we could do. Such students of our subject as we may fortunately have succeeded in making hungry for still more knowledge than we ourselves supply, we can conscientiously send, for further partial satisfaction of their desire, to that series of books, already once named by us, which has lately been published at Chicago, under the title, "The Great French Writers." Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co. have done a true service to the cause of letters in general, and in particular to the cause of what may be called international letters, in reproducing this series of books. They are good books, they are well translated, and they appear in handsome form. Madame de Sevigne, Montesquieu, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and three names that, together with all of their several kinds, economists, philosophers, historians, we here have been obliged to omit, Turgot, Victor Cousin, Thiers, are in the list of authors treated in the volumes thus far issued. An interesting doubt may, in retrospect of all, be submitted, without author's solution supplied, to entertain the speculation of the wisely considerate reader. Let the earlier still living French literature, that part of the whole body, we mean, ending, say, with the date of Montesquieu, which, in a rough approximate way, may be described as dominated by the spirit of classicism--let this be compared with the later French literature, that section in which the leaven of romanticism has strongly worked, and do you find existing an important fundamental difference in intimate quality between the one and the other? Is the later literature of a certain softer fiber, a more yielding consistence, than characterizes the earlier? Does the earlier present a harder, more quartz-like structure, a substance better fitted to resist yet for ages to come the slow but tireless tooth of time? INDEX.