The natural refuge of justice ought to be in the press, but unfortunately, as I have observed elsewhere, justice is not a very convenient or acceptable quality in literature, and least of all in journalism. Its constant tendency is to diminish the display of what people foolishly take for literary force, and to make what might otherwise have been called forcible writing seem dull and commonplace. Now, the French journalist may be wildly inaccurate, he may be wrong in all his statements, and give suppositions in the place of facts, but he cannot afford to be dull, as he addresses readers whose chief peculiarity, as he well knows, is to be inattentive. Wit and exaggeration are the baits by which the French reader is to be caught, but wit is seldom just, and exaggeration never is. There was poor John Brown, the Queen’s domestic, I will not say what the French press made of him, but in the exercise of its Gallic sharpness it got a good way beyond the truth. French writers are rather fond of laughing at the Queen, as English writers have laughed at various foreign sovereigns, and sometimes the laugh is harmless yet based on inaccurate information. For example, M. Philippe Daryl says that after a drawing-room “la reine remonte dans son carosse à six chevaux café-au-lait, de race hanovrienne comme elle, et prend le chemin de Windsor.” This is a French fiction, intended to make the Queen a little ridiculous; the Frenchman is trotting out the cream-coloured horses (they are eight, not six) for the occasion, and despatches them on the road to Windsor. As a matter of fact the Queen travels to Windsor by rail, and usually drives to the Paddington Station behind four bays, so that the whole pleasantry falls rather flat on an English reader. It is a trifle, but it may serve to illustrate the position of a French writer who must be amusing at all costs. [Sidenote: Great Writers not Just.] [Sidenote: Sparkle and Glitter more Valuable than Justice.] The great writers are in the same position with a difference. They need not amuse; but they are bound to provide a stirring stimulus. Was Victor Hugo a just writer? Was Carlyle? They knew their business, which was to be forcible; but nobody who understood their nature, or their art either, would go to Victor Hugo for a faithful account of the English, or to Carlyle for an exact appreciation of the French. Or shall we turn to Michelet and Ruskin?--both makers of delightful prose, but too much biassed by their own genius to be just. In literature force and brilliance, nay, even mere glassy sparkle or glitter of tinsel, are more effective qualities than the hesitancy that cannot round off a sentence without stopping to inquire whether the praise in it is not too much for the occasion, or the censure undeserved. Suppose that a just writer were asked to give, in five or six lines, his opinion of the railway system, and its action for good and evil, how would he describe it? [Sidenote: A just Account of Railways.]