JULES JANIN, AND THE PARIS FEUILLETONISTES. Jules Janin, whose name, of so constant recurrence in the contemporary history of light literature, artistic criticism, and _feuilleton_, is the Prince Royal of the brilliant court of gifted, tasteful, witty and _spirituel_ writers, who compose the body of Parisian _feuilletonistes_. These are men who write, not because they have any thing especial to say--for their peculiar function is to say nothing, in a pointed and brilliant manner--but because they love leisure and luxury, the opera, pictures, and beautiful ballet girls, and must themselves make the golden lining to their purses, which they can do by the very simple process of weaving the similar lining of their brains into a _feuilleton_. They are often scholars, men of fine cultivation and genius, whose tastes however are so imperious, and who enjoy so much the ease thus facilely achieved, that they accomplish no great work, win no lasting name. Of course the _feuilletonist_ proper is to be distinguished from the author or novelist who publishes a work in the _Feuilleton_, as Lamartine his _Confidences_, and Sue and Dumas and George Sand, their romances. We propose now to follow briefly the sparkling career of JULES JANIN as the type of the life, character, and success of the _feuilletonistes_. He came to Paris, a Jew: as Meyerbeer, Heine, Grisi, Rachel, and the long luminous list of contemporary artists who have made fame in Paris, are Jews. He supported himself by teaching--doing nothing, but very conscious that he could do something--at all events he could lecture upon the Syrian language, if for a week he could prepare himself. Then he wrote in little theatrical papers, and received twenty-five francs a month. But in 1830 he happily succeeded to his present position in the _Journal des Debats_. He is now a rich man. He gives splendid soirees in his saloons glittering with oriental luxury, and artists and authors bow before him. Like Henry Heine, his contemporary, whom he as much resembles in talent as in manner, he declared now for the Republic and Freedom, now for the Church and King, until his connection with the _Debats_ impressed upon him the conservative seal. He since loudly declaims for public morality--against the prostitution of the press; but his early works were the most licentious of any that have swarmed from the fertile French genius of social protestantism. His first novel, published in 1829, _The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman_, is the history of a prostitute, from the brothel, to the murder of her child, and her execution, garnished with Byronic sentimentalities upon the transitoriness of things temporal.