We think of this Thersites sometimes when our eyes light, in big double-sheeted daily or fashionable monthly, on a column or two, fresh from over the water, of exhaustive minutiæ of the daily life, walk and conversation of French artists, playwrights, actors and actresses. Matter of this sort was not wont to be so absorbingly interesting to the American reader. The time was not very long since when a very little of it went a great way with him--when the domestic troubles of Madame de Caux and the personal habits of M. Sardou would not have been considered worth as many lines as they now get paragraphs. Even such assiduously advertised affairs as the relations of De Musset and George Sand, and Rachel's patronage of her pets among the gilded youth, created no contemporary sensation comparable to that consequent upon their resuscitation. And we were none the worse for missing such topics, although they were rather less unworthy of study than the corresponding gossip of to-day. Literature, the drama, music and pictorial art on the Continent were certainly not at a lower standard fifteen or twenty years ago than now. The inner halo around their leading lights was not less attractive or less deserving of micrometric analysis. No first-class name has been added to their number in either walk, nor are the individual careers of the second-class characters who have succeeded them at all more fruitful in salient traits for instruction or entertainment. It is a familiar theory that the creative age dies out as the critical age gains strength--that when we grow nice, finical and blasé as to the quality of our intellectual aliment, we prove thereby the enfeeblement of our intellectual appetite and digestion. At present, the circumstances point to our having gone a step farther still, and attained the _hyper_critical stage. Our attention now has degenerated into a study of the dishes wherein the aforesaid food is served--their lustre, fabric, style and "crackle," a craze in flesh-and-blood ceramics. We never get tired of holding them up to the light and minutely mapping all their flaws and beauties, with each shade of color and glaze, superficial and iridescent or struck through and solid. There may be something in the fierce light that beats upon a literary or artistic throne beneficial alike to subject and monarch. But here there are too many thrones, and the light is too fierce. Let us have a selection of potentates to be illuminated, and let us turn down the gas a little. E.B. LITERATURE OF THE DAY. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.