inspiring horror of that vice. They are not as that sinner George Sand. But it is time to observe that it is just in this "morality" of theirs that their literary weakness lies; and that the strength of George Sand's works, with their far more idealistic and chaste delineations, lies in their "immorality." In the apparently extremely audacious works of the Realistic School, there is not an utterance to compare in real audacity with that which George Sand has put into the mouth of one of the chief characters in _Horace_, and which gives admirably condensed expression to her ideas of morality in the matter of love: "I believe that that love should be defined as a noble passion, which elevates and strengthens us by beautiful feelings and thoughts, and that love as an evil passion, which makes us selfish and cowardly and gives us over to all the meannesses of blind instinct. Every passion, therefore, is lawful or criminal according to its production of one or the other of these results--it being a matter of no consequence that official society, which is not the supreme court of justice of humanity, sometimes legalises the evil, and condemns the beneficent passion."[1] In _Lélia_ and _Jacques_ (1833 and 1834) their authoress's Byronic "Weltschmerz" and declamatory tendency reach high-water mark. In _Lélia_ she represented her ideal great, unsensual, profoundly feeling woman, and provided her with an opposite in her sister, Pulchérie, a luxurious courtesan. Taking her own character and separating the two sides of it, she formed Lélia after the Minerva-image, Pulchérie after the Venus-image in her own soul; the result being, not unnaturally, rather two symbolic personages than two human beings of flesh and blood. In _Jacques_ she approached the problem of marriage from a new side. In _Indiana_ she had portrayed a brutal, in _Valentine_ a refined, cold husband; but now she equipped the husband with the qualities which in her eyes were the highest, and wrecked his happiness upon the rock of his own elevated character, which his insignificant young wife is not capable of understanding and continuing to love. The authoress has endeavoured to impart additional force to her own opinions by putting them into the mouth of the wronged husband. He himself excuses his wife: "No human being can control love; and no one is guilty because he loves or ceases to loves. What degrades the woman is the lie; what constitutes the adultery is not the hour she grants her lover, but the night she spends in her husband's arms afterwards." Jacques feels it his duty to make way for his rival: "Borel, in my place, would calmly have beaten his wife, and would probably not have blushed to embrace that same night the woman degraded alike by his blows and his kisses. There are men who, in the Oriental fashion, calmly kill their faithless wives, because they regard them as their lawful property. Others challenge their rival, kill him or