short Paixhans and its long twenty-fours. * * * * * LITERARY NOTICES. _Études sur Pascal_. Par M. VICTOR COUSIN. Cinqième Edition, revue et augmentée. Paris: 1857. pp. 566. 8vo. We render hearty thanks to M. Cousin for this new edition of a favorite work. No library which contains Pascal's "Provinciales" and "Pensées" should be without it. "Of all the monuments of the French language," says M. Cousin, in the _Avant-propos_ to this new edition, "none is more celebrated than the work 'Les Pensées,' and French literature possesses no artist more consummate than Pascal. Do not expect to find in this young geometrician, so soon consumed by disease and passion, the breadth, surface, and infinite variety of Bossuet, who, supported by vast and uninterrupted study, rose and rose until he gained the loftiest reaches of intellect and art, and commanded at pleasure every tone and every style. Pascal did not fulfil all his destiny. Besides the mathematics and natural philosophy he knew scarcely more than a little theology, and he barely passed through good society. It is true, Pascal passed away from earth quickly; but during his short life he discerned glimpses of the _beau ideal_, he attached himself to it with all his heart and soul and strength, and he never allowed anything to leave his hands unless it bore its lively impress. So great was his passion for perfection, that unchallenged tradition tells us he wrote the seventeenth 'Provinciale' thirteen times over. 'Les Pensées' are merely fragments of the great work on which he consumed the last years of his life; but these fragments sometimes present so finished a beauty, that we do not know which most to admire, the grandeur and vigor of the sentiments and ideas, or the delicacy and depth of the art." This praise is unexaggerated. What a career was run by this genius! Discovering the science of geometry at twelve years of age,--next inventing the arithmetical machine,--discovering atmospheric pressure, while every philosopher was prating about "Nature's horror of a vacuum,"--inventing the wheelbarrow, to divert his mind from the pains of the toothache, and succeeding,--inventing the theory of probabilities,--establishing the first omnibuses that ever relieved the public,--then writing the "Provinciales,"--dying at thirty-three, leaving behind him two small volumes (you may carry them in your pocket) which are the unchallengeable title-deeds of his immortal fame, the favorite works of Gibbon, Voltaire, Macaulay, and Cousin! Where else can so crowded and so short a career be found?