This volume gives the most vivid picture of the manners, morals, and government of France during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV., and the whole of that of Louis XV., we have ever seen. It enables the reader to understand the real character of that _Ancien Régime_ which was overthrown by the Revolution of 1789, and exhibits a state of society bereft of all moral vigor, licentious, lazy, impudent, debilitated, dissolute, without religion, without shame, without any depth of passion, and superficial even in its wickedness. The author of the sketches, himself a Frenchman without much austerity of principle, glances lightly over his themes, bringing out with a certain French refinement of perception and phrase all the piquant littlenesses of his subject, and, a wit himself, taking great delight in making his readers familiar with the wit of others. He has sacked all the many memoirs of the time for materials; has selected with a nice tact all their stimulating matter, without burdening his page with their trash; and, before attempting the task of composition, evidently familiarized his imagination with the persons and events he describes, so that they moved before him picturesquely, enveloped in their own peculiar atmosphere. The result is quite a dramatic exhibition of kings, princesses, ministers of state, royal and noble mistresses, authors, poets, comedians, actresses, philosophers, artists, atheists, and _savans_, discriminated in their kind from all others, yet still agreeing with the radical principles of human nature, as those principles were combined in the Frenchman of the eighteenth century, and in a court in which virtue was a jest, vice a distinction, infamy a fashion, and marriage vows as false as dicers’ oaths. The sketch of Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour of the Crebillons, of Buffon, of Cardinal de Bernis, of Mademoiselle Clarion, of Sophie Arnould, of the Duc de Richelieu, (the universal rake,) of Dufresnoy, Marivaux, Dorat, Poson, Fontenelle, and La Fontaine, are representative of the whole. The society described is pretty well summed up by Crebillon, as consisting of “ruined gentlemen living upon their neighbors, rich actresses living with ruined gentlemen.” To an American, the most remarkable thing in the whole representation is the easy suspension of all moral rules whatever in this “good company.” Before he gets half through the book he almost forgets that there is such a thing as duty, or religion, or morality, or glory, or any thing but five senses, in human nature. He feels that the whole structure implies a frightful amount of misgovernment and oppression at home, and of scandalous mismanagement abroad, that France is given up to the plunder of roués and harlots, but the style of Arsene Houssaye is so smooth, and his epigrams so airy and keen, and the felicities he quotes so sparkling, that the whole representation seems to justify itself, and to exhibit quite a delightful scheme of