Monsieur Michelet, a French individual of questionable morals, first writes a book about "Love," and then clinches it with one about "Woman." It is hardly necessary to add, that he treats both subjects in a thoroughly French manner, and makes one a continuation of the other. Love is a charming little story in every man's life, "complete in one number"--Number one. Woman is a love-story, "to be continued" until, like all other continued stories, it ends with marriage! Such is the logic implied by Monsieur Michelet's two books, and whether it is calculated to elevate or degrade the weaker sex, a majority of educated American women have eagerly read the books and accepted the sentiments as so many compliments. And the men? They leisurely rove through the leaves of monsieur's mental Valambrosa, and say: "How Frenchy!" And in that natural exclamation we find the most complete and just criticism of "L'Amour" and "La Femme" possible to American lips or pen. This Michelet, my boy, is a man of talent and remarkably clear poetical perception. He is as much like Hallam as a Frenchman can be like an Englishman, and France honors him for his development of the poetry of her history; but is that any reason why he should be accepted as the modern High-priest of Love and the Censor of Woman? By no means. Madame de Stael was thinking of a Frenchman when she wrote: "Love is only an episode in man's life"--and may have referred to herself when she added: "but it is woman's whole existence." Had an American woman spoken this, we should suspect the sentiment to be nothing more than the reproach of a disappointed passion; but of the Frenchman it is indisputably true, as well as of woman wherever we find her. The French do not know what Fidelity means, my boy; they have chameleon souls, and remain true to one object only until another comes within their reach. Like mad bulls, they are attracted by the quiescent warmth of fiery-red; and, having attained it, tear it to pieces in their passion. What can such people know about Love? Nothing. They call Love "L'Amour," and when we speak of a man's "amours," we mean that he "loves" like a Frenchman. Monsieur Michelet is a Frenchman; and supposing him to be an ordinary one, we must accept his sentiments regarding Woman as we would those of an Apicius regarding a delicacy he apostrophizes before devouring. But Michelet's temperament is poetical, and while he looks upon Woman as a foretaste of the sensualist's paradise, and upon Love as the means of gaining it, he covers up the grossness of his ideas with robes borrowed from the angels. Adopting Kepler's canon, that "harmony is the perfection of relations," he makes Woman, the creature, a continuation of Love, the sentiment; and the tenor of his "L'Amour" and "La Femme" is, that both must be possessed by man, in order to perfect the union which makes them a perfect One.