The other extreme into which the literature of the day in France has fallen is an excess of fancy. A writer like Arsène Houssaye will write his "King Voltaire" or his "Madame de Pompadour," or Capefigue his "Madame de la Vallière," in which the judgment seems to have been set aside, and historical facts accumulated in some opium-dream are strangely woven into a narrative representing reality, with about as much truth as Oriental arabesques, or the adornings of richly wrought tapestry. This extreme is even more dangerous than the former, for it makes of letters a mere plaything, and recommends itself to many by its very faults. Paradox and overdrawn scenes usurp the place of the real. The world presented by the exclusive worshippers of fancy is little better than that "Pompadour" style of painting in which the carnation-tipped checks of shepherds and shepherdesses take the place of a too healthy Rubens-like portraiture. There are dainty, well-trimmed lambs, with pretty blue favors tied about their necks, just like _dragées_ and _bonbons_. As we wander among those opera-swains in silk hose and those shepherdesses in satin bodices, their perfumes tire and nauseate, till we fairly wish for a good breeze wafted from some farm-yard, reconciled in a measure to the extravagances of the so-called "school of Nature." M. Merlet's subject, it may be seen, is of interest merely to the student of the latest French literature. A more comprehensive study would not have been out of place in his volume. To those who may be interested in writers like Murger, Feydeau, Houssaye, and Brifaut, the book is full of interesting matter. To the general reader it may be of value as characterizing with fidelity some of the tendencies of French thought. * * * * * We must not omit mentioning a work published in Germany on the "Literature of the Second Empire since the _Coup d'État_ of the Second of December, 1852."[K] The nature of this sketch could almost be predicated with certainty from the state of feeling towards France in the capital in which it was issued, and the encomiums it received from the Prussian political press. The author, William Reymond, who has proved himself no mean critic in some of his former essays upon the modern productions of France, addresses himself almost exclusively to a German public. His work, as he himself seemed to fear, is not calculated for the taste of Paris, even if it were considered unobjectionable there on the score of the political strictures that are introduced, whether in the discussion of the last play or in the analysis of the last volume of poems. [Footnote K: _Études sur la Littérature du Second Empire Français, depuis le Coup d'État du deux Decembre._ Par William Reymond. Berlin: A. Charisius. 12mo. pp. 227.]