forced to abdicate his royal pretensions after sacrificing them to the love of an unworthy woman who has fooled him, and Fréderique bidding farewell to all the hopes that centred in her little Zara, forgetting everything besides being a mother, and devoting all her powers towards rescuing her child from the sickness that is killing him? It is unfair to M. Daudet to say that he only possesses the art of painting the _chatoyant_ lights, the picturesque outside of Parisian life, the dresses, the furniture, and the scenery; to represent him as merely a skilful manufacturer of _bimbeloterie_. We may tax him with abuse of description, and that habit of _reportage_ peculiar to the daily press; and it would be vain to look in him for the sobriety that enhances the beauty of some immortal works of art; but such sobriety is incompatible with an art which aims at painting human life in all its aspects, all its details, all its colours. Neither Shakspeare, Dickens, nor Balzac is sober. To be sure M. Daudet is neither a Dickens nor a Balzac, but his delicate sensibility makes him penetrate far below the outer crust, to the human ground of the characters, and the life they live is a real one. On account of this, the first quality of a novelist, one forgives the brutality and the pretentious passages, an imitation, the one of M. Zola, the other of M. de Goncourt, and the inequalities of a style which is, nevertheless, in wonderful harmony with the world he paints. That which constitutes M. Daudet's great superiority over other novelists of the realistic school, is that he has no contempt for humanity, that he always loves it, often pities, and sometimes admires it. Nothing can be more false, more unpleasant, or, we may venture to say, more tiresome, than the view taken by a certain would-be scientific pessimism of humanity, as being nothing but a compound of vileness, vapidness, and folly. M. Zola is learning it to his cost. After the immense success of "L'Assommoir," due to the great power of the painter, as also to the horror inspired by scenes of unparalleled crudeness, he wished to outdo himself and depict in "Nana" the lowest depths of Parisian corruption. To make the impression the more complete, he has not let in a single breath of pure air; or introduced a single character which was not insipidly stupid and sensual, enslaved by the lowest appetites, incapable of a single noble thought or generous sentiment. The effect on the public was weariness rather than disgust. _Le Voltaire_, which had expected to make its fortune by bringing out the book in _feuilletons_, was greatly surprised to see its circulation rapidly fail, actually on account of M. Zola's novel. We are afraid the same thing will happen with regard to the work announced by M. Flaubert. This great writer and conscientious artist is unfortunately persuaded, in spite of his admiration for I. Tourguéneff (that true painter of humanity, of its virtues as of its