with eloquent force, and with not a little of the earnestness which reminds the reader of his personal controversies with the Roman Catholic Church. * * * * * A history of _Marie Stuart_, by I. M. Dargaud, has just been published in Paris, and for its brilliancy, completeness, clearness, and impartiality, attracts much attention. Queen Mary of Scotland was one of the famously beautiful women whose history is romance. She must be named with the heroines of history and the figures of poetry, with Helen, and Aspasia, and Cleopatra. Certainly, we trace no more sparkling and sorrowful career than hers upon the confused page of history, and our admiration, condemnation, surprise, sorrow and delight, fall, summed in a tear, upon her grave. In this work it appears that she was undoubtedly privy to the death of Darnley. During his assassination, she was dancing at Holyrood. The fearful fascination of a brigand like Bothwell, for so proud and passionate a nature as Mary's, is well explained by M. Dargaud. He is just, also, to her own tragedy, the long and bitter suffering, the betrayal of friends; the final despair, and the laying aside two crowns to mount the scaffold. She died nobly, and as most of the illustrious victims of history have died; as if nature, unwilling that they should live, would yet compassionately show the world in their ending, that heroism and nobility were not altogether unknown to them. _Apropos_ of this history of Queen Mary, Lamartine has written a letter to Beranger, which praises the work exceedingly, but much more glorifies himself. The letter is a perfect specimen of that vanity, wherein only Lamartine is sublime: "Ah! if you or I had had such a heroine at twenty years, what epic poems and what songs would have been the result!" * * * * * THE COUNT MONTALEMBERT, the fervid champion of Catholicism in the French chamber, has just published a work, entitled _The higher and lower Radicalism: in its enmity to Religion, Right, Freedom and Justice, in France, Switzerland and Italy_. * * * * *