But his weekly contributions to the _Debats_, the rapid dashing review of the dramatic novelties and incidents in a metropolis where alone a living drama survives, and which he serves up garnished with the most felicitous verbal graces and the most charming intellectual conceits, every Monday morning--these are the flowers whence the brilliant Jules Janin builds the honey hive of his reputation. He has decreed the fashion of the _Feuilleton_, and the other Parisian critics flash and snap and sparkle, as much like Jules Janin as possible. Their articles are the streak of _light_ in the dimness of the preponderating political literature of the week. They hold high holiday at the bottom of the page, although the history of revolutions, and woes, and the rumors of wars and impending millenniums may throw their sombre shadows along the columns above. They raise their banner of a butterfly's wing, emblazoned with _Vive la Bagatelle_, and march on to the tournament of wit and beauty. They belong to France; their game is the gambol of the exuberance of French genius. They are more than witty, they are _spirituel_; and they have more than talent, they have taste. In a day of such rapid and facile printing as ours, this department of literary labor was a necessity. Every man who has a conceit and can write, may parade it before the world. In the mass of pleasant common-place, what is _bizarre_ may supplant the symmetrically beautiful. To seize therefore what every man saw, and with nimble fingers to weave a transparent tissue of gorgeous words through which every man's impressions of what he saw look large and graceful and piquant--to sum up a vaudeville in a _bon mot_, and a ballet in a voluptuous trope,--_voila! c'est fait_, you have the recipe of a successful _feuilletoniste_. Hence, the influence of these writers, upon _words_, has been remarkable. The French language, long so precise, is now among the most dissolute of tongues. It reels through the columns of a _feuilleton_, drunk and dim-eyed with expletives and exaggerations and beatified adjectives, so that, fascinated with the casket, you quite forget the jewel. The language of dramatic and operatic criticism in Paris is now inexplicable to any one but an _habitué_. If you should tell John Bull, who wishes to go to the opera, that Alboni's singing is _pyramidale_, he would expect to see the fair and fat contralto sharpened to a point at top,--but, I grant, if you should call it "jolly" or "stunning," he would entirely comprehend that you meant to express your admiration in superlatives.