de Rémusat, wherein he judges everything, literature, politics, and history, with a haughty originality from the point of view of his own interests and passions. Some of his sayings relative to the government of men are worthy of Machiavelli. The reasonings whereby he explains and justifies the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien would form a splendid chapter to the "Prince." But from the moral point of view Napoleon strikes us as the most perfect type of a tyrant. No moral law exists for him; he does not admit the obligation of any duty; he does not even recognise those duties of a sovereign, that subordination of the individual to the interests of the State, which constitute the greatness of a Cromwell or a Frederick II.; he recognises but one law, that of his nature, which insists on dominating and being superior to everything that surrounds him. _Quia nominor Leo_, is his only rule. Morals always have their revenge on those whose encroaching personality refuses to recognise laws. Writers or sovereigns, whatever their genius, relapse into falsehood and extravagance. This was Napoleon's fate. You are always conscious in him of the _parvenu_ acting a part--the _commediante tragediante_, as Pius VII. put it. He had fits of goodness, of weakness even, but his human and generous sides had been crushed by his frightful egoism. He liked to make those he loved best suffer. He treated his wife and his mistresses with brutal contempt; he could no longer lament the death of those who seemed dearest to him. "Je n'ai pas le temps de m'occuper des morts," he said to Talleyrand. By the side of this great figure Mme. de Rémusat has, in her Memoirs, sketched many others--the frivolous, good, touching, and unfortunate Josephine; the amiable Hortense Beauharnais, the dry, cold Louis, Napoleon's sisters, jealous, proud, and immoral; and others--but all pale before the imperial colossus. Besides M. Daudet's novel, M. Renan's new volume, and the Memoirs of Mme. de Rémusat, the last three months have witnessed another literary event of some consequence--the birth of an important Review, which aims at the position occupied for thirty years past by the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The _Nouvelle Revue_ was started and is edited by a woman, Mme. Edmond Adam, known as a writer under the name of Juliette Lamber. A new phenomenon this in the literary world, the strangest feature of it being that Mme. Adam has taken exclusively upon herself the bulletin of foreign politics. If the task of editing a Review be arduous for a man, who in the interest of his undertaking must brave every enmity and quench his individual sympathies, how much more so for a woman whose staff of contributors is recruited from the _habitués_ of her _salon_, and who must be constantly tempted to carry into her official transactions the habits of gracious hospitality which have made her house one of the most courted political and literary centres of Paris?