a deadly ignorance, incapacity to talk or to make themselves agreeable, that the young men leave them for the society of _cocottes_. Now, Theuriet has been a good deal in the society of English people, and while he stoutly maintains that his girl-characters are thoroughly French, he yet admits that the idea of describing a kind of young girl that in France is always assumed to be hoydenish and ill-brought-up, came to him from observing the family-life of his neighbors from across the Channel. Theuriet is not a great writer: he has none of that power of analyzing physical and mental emotions in which Balzac and Stendhal are the great adepts, though their descriptions, while unquestionably implying great knowledge of the human heart, produce upon the Anglo-Saxon reader a feeling of pain, of offence, and often of disgust. I once asked him if he thought France, under the present bourgeois regime, likely to return to a healthier taste in literature, and received as answer the assurance that since coarse and sordid realism _could_ go no further than _L'Assommoir_, a reaction _must_ set in. From the filthiness of low life, I dare say, but how about the elegant fleshliness of the previous school? France will have to undergo a complete turning inside out before this loses its hold upon the national mind; as a proof of which I may mention the fact that a man who knew as much of the world and of books as Taine does, one day said to me that the best advice he could offer to a foreigner who thought of devoting himself to letters was to carry back with him, to his own country, Balzac, Stendhal and Merimee.