To return to the volumes of M. Gerusez. It is rather a sign of poverty in general literary history, that detached sketches, with little connection beyond their chronological order, should have been deemed worthy of the prize and the praises awarded to them. However, though lacking in comprehensive views such as we have a right to expect from an author who attempts to portray the rise, growth, and full expansion of a literature, the work of M. Gerusez may be perused with pleasure and profit by the student. It is clear and satisfactory in the details. Thus, the pages devoted to the writers of the "Encyclopédie," though few, may vie with any that have been written to set in their true light men whose influence was so great on the generation that succeeded them. If impartiality consisted in always steering in the _juste-milieu_, M. Gerusez would be the most impartial of historians. As it is, we have to thank him for a good book, regretting only that he has gone no farther. Far otherwise is it with M. Saint-Marc Girardin. The eloquent Sorbonne professor has seen his fame increase with every new volume of his "Course of Dramatic Literature." We have now the fourth volume.[H] "A Course of Dramatic Literature";--it is more. It is the history of the expression of Passion among the ancients and the moderns, by no means confined to the drama. The present volume, as well as the third, published several years ago, is devoted to the analysis of Love as expressed in different ages and by different nations, under the two divisions of _L'Amour Ingénu_ and _L'Amour Conjugal_. [Footnote H: _Cours de Littérature Dramatique._ Par Saint-Marc Girardin, de l'Académie Française, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Paris, Membre du Conseil Impérial de l'Instruction Publique. Tome IV. Paris: Charpentier.] The first he had studied in the authors of antiquity in his third volume, beginning in this with the episode of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius; then following up, through the moderns, the expression of Ingenuous Love in Corneille, La Fontaine, Sédaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Milton, Gessner, Voss, André Chénier, and Chateaubriand. For the last he finds more blame than praise. Indeed, this effect-seeking writer, with all his genius, seemed less fitted than any one to express the natural and spontaneous. His Atala, who charms us so at the first reading, deals in studied emotions. As to René, his is the vain sentimentality parading its own impotency for higher feelings, a virtual boasting of want of soul,--the sickly dissatisfaction of Werther, without his passion for an excuse. M. Saint-Marc Girardin then follows up his subject through later authors, even in Madame George Sand and in Madame Émile de Girardin. He is particularly severe upon Lamartine, that poet "who for more than thirty years seemed best to express love as our century understands it," but who in Raphael and Graziella destroyed, by disclosing too much, the power of his "Méditations Poétiques."