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amount of book-writing or exhortation produce it? It is a social growth, springing from a certain set of social conditions, and unless you can reproduce the conditions, it is hopeless to think of securing the result. The grace of the salon is, to begin with, hardly possible in a new society like that of America. The new society has a thousand advantages of its own; it has roominess and freedom, and perhaps gives greater scope for the development of original and independent character; but then the prime condition of this is a self-assertion, an habitual manifestation above all other things of your own personality, that is absolutely fatal to the ease, the well-mannered reserve, the polished compliance, of the salon. Brains are not enough to compose the spirit

that we would hide the legends from children. Quite the opposite. We hold that a child should be-and we know that any decently intelligent child can be taught from the beginning the difference between legend and history. Children should be told the legends as legends; if proper care is taken, they will enjoy them as stories without confounding them with the history, and when, in later years, they find them told as history, they will not be puzzled, but will be quite able to draw the distinction. Again it is absolutely necessary to teach a child from the beginning the phenomena of races and languages, and the differences between the geography of one age and another. People who do not understand these things themselves at once cry out that a child could never understand all this. There never of a salon. They are essential, but they are was a greater mistake. A correct and scientific statement is really much easier to understand than an inaccurate and muddle-headed statement. The grown-up person finds a difficulty in understanding, because with him falsehood must be cast out before truth can come in. But the child's mind is white paper, and it is just as easy to write truth on it as to write error. Miss Yonge always writes so well and clearly that we wish she had undertaken something of the kind. At all events her book is a wonderful advance on anything of the kind that has ever been attempted before. It is, we repeat, the first time that competent knowledge and competent literary skill have ever been brought to bear directly on such an attempt.

From The Saturday Review. PORTRAITS OF CELEBRATED WOMEN.*

not more essential than gracious and vivid manners; and such manners cannot be acquired by direct effort, but spring up with a certain spontaneity from a peculiar mental temper. Now this mental temper is not likely to find much foothold in American society for a very long time to come. The go-ahead impulse, with which the needs of the American people will not permit them to dispense, is too strong, and an exceeding desire to go ahead in material things is destructive of those tastes, and ways of thinking and feeling about literary, social, æsthetic things, out of which the most gracious and elevated intercourse grows. You cannot have a salon when everybody is thinking of the great Pacific railroad; perhaps you cannot have one in a country of vehement and rowdy party-politics. Still it is an excellent sign that any American should publicly avow the possibility of anything in Europe being worth borrowing. THE translator of M. Sainte-Beuve's well- It is a symptom that at all events the known portraits of Madame de Staël, Ma- fine and gracious spirit of an old society, dame Roland, and other women famous in thoroughly cultivated, is more nearly within the history of French society, is an Ameri- reach than one would have been inclined to can lady, and she avows that among her ob- infer from the vulgar contempt with which jects in making such a book accessible to a such persons as Mrs. Stowe are wont to greater number of persons is the desire of talk about the worm-eaten fabric of effete infusing into American society some of the Europe. We should have been glad, by grace of the French salon; and beyond this, the way, if the translator had made a beshe hopes that" its graver biographies may ginning of good things in literature by abserve to remind some of the more gifted staining from certain American abominations among the anxious and aimless' sisterhood in the way of spelling. Endeavor, savor, of the possibility of sober and useful literary labor, gayety, and such words make one careers." Nothing can be more laudable ill. And what can describe the sensation than such an intention. But does she not of a man who knows the English tongue see that the salon cometh not by observa- when he hears of critics being 66 ever eager tion any more than the kingdom of heaven, to offset one superior quality against anothnor by mere wishing for, nor will any er"? Then to say that "I have not left my unfortunate friend in all these days" is French, not English. And why translate mot by word, when it means a saying, or

Portraits of Celebrated Women. By CA Salute-Beuve. Translated by Harriet W. Preston. London, Sampson Low, Son, & Marston. 1868.

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both exceedingly well worthy of the attention alike of an English and an American public. Those who are so unfortunate as not to be able to read the original are all the more in a case which makes it desirable that they should read a translation like the present; for in M. Sainte-Beuve's portraits we find many of the best qualities of French literary art an art which in all its secondary forms is consummate beyond comparison. The combination of infinite delicacy with infinite precision which marks these nine pictures is worthy of the highest admiration, as the finest product of laborious and keenly intelligent workmanship. Somebody has said, and with justice we think, that the reason why French people have better dinners than we have is that they begin their

number of words? Would the translator interpret bons mots by the English good words? Probably not. The translator is not very consistent in her adoption of French words into English. In the same page we find hauteur standing as untranslateable, and yet doctrinary greets us as good English. Surely one would have thought it much easier to find a perfect equivalent for the first word than to be content with so uncouth a phrase as the second. A person who is too much of a purist to be satisfied with doctrinaire, which is an accepted term with a technical and specific meaning — while doctrinary conveys hardly any meaning at all-should not leave hauteur, rôle, and so on, which may be perfectly well reproduced in English. Why leave coterie, and yet speak of Septembrist? preparations for this great meal as soon as And why use the questionable inedited, when unpublished is to her hand? The translator in one place makes a bold essay to render the impossible word bête, but she can scarcely be counted happy. 'You can't reproduce a smile and an accent on paper," says Sainte-Beuve; " paper is bête" brutish," says the translator; but "brutish" will not do at all. Here perhaps we are in presence of the one French word which cannot be reproduced in our own language, and which has a right in many cases, if not quite in all, to stand untranslated. However, on the whole, the translation is very fairly executed, and if people complain that they do not find the exquisite flavour of Sainte-Beuve's style, they are sighing after what cannot possibly be got, which, under the circumstances, is the most stupid and graceless of all proceedings. We can conceive the original delicacy of such a passage as this, that "Amid much that is sorrowful, there is at least this consolation about surviving one's illustrious contemporaries, when one is illustrious one's self and reverent of human glory; leisure and opportunity are afforded to crown their pictures, to repair their statues, to sacrifice at their graves." Sainte-Beuve is talking of the greater justice which Chateaubriand eventually rendered to the fame and genius of Madame de Staël. But, alas! the terrible on was too much for the translator, and we flounder inelegantly in ugly talk about one's being illustrious one's self," which is pardonable perhaps, but is not what an English Sainte-Beuve would be likely to write.

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The,

they get up in the morning; while our
cooks and housewives leave everything until
a quarter of an hour or so before the time
of serving. We cannot help thinking that
something of the same secret lies at the bot-
tom of the superiority of the French secon-
dary literature. There is an air of patient
and conscientious toil about M. Sainte-
Beuve's writing, to anybody who knows
how writing is done, but which may escape
the reader who does not greatly concern
himself how effects are produced.
ease of a good performer on the trapeze
may delude the spectator into the idea that
the feats are as easy to do as they are to
look at. Experts know better. The grace
and finish and apparent absence of effort
are results of intense effort at one time or
another, and M. Sainte-Beuve's ease has
been secured by arduous exertion. Light
as his papers may seem, they are filled with
thoroughness of knowledge, and thorough-
ness, however gracefully it may be veiled,
is not to be had without toilsome and pro-
longed search. It is a simple matter to
pile up words of vague delicacy, which seem
to breathe a delightful 700s; this is a style
in which any puniest scribe may win a
measure of sounding success.
In manners,
elegance is a small thing without manli-
ness; and just in the same way delicacy,
when it is simply a curtain for inexact and
half-shaped impressions, is the worst of im-
postures.

In these portraits, as in most of his other work, M. Sainte-Beuve's task is definite characterization, the true function of the critic. Nothing can be more happy, for he We can scarcely imagine any book in has a sympathy for the fulness and depth contemporary French literature better worth and disinterestedness of women's emotions translating than this of M. Sainte-Beuve's; that seems to shed discovering rays over both the subjects and the manner do the his analysis. The motto prefixed, as the fullest justice to the writer, and they are translator reminds us, to the French edi

tion, discloses the secret of his skill in these | and, in her own words, to disentangle, all

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the allusions-treat her, in short, as we treat Clarissa Harlowe when we have a fortnight of leisure and rainy weather in the country." We can understand M. of him as spending a leisurely fortnight in Sainte-Beuve's style better after thinking disentangling the manifold points of Clarissa.

From The Economist.

PROBABLE RENEWAL OF THE RECIPRO-
CITY TREATY BETWEEN THE UNITED
STATES AND CANADA.

A PRACTICAL LESSON IN PROTECTION.

And this is true. M. Sainte-Beuve has a warm love, in itself eminently feminine, for the fine emotions, the tenderness, the generosity, the high impulse, of women when they are at their best. Women like De Staël, Roland, Madame Krudener, throwing their warmth and impulse into concerns which in the hands of men only appear cold, hard, and not very human, possess an irresistible attraction for him. IN 1854, a Treaty for the mutual exIt is really a kind of love with which he change of commodities was settled between looks at them, reads their works, meditates the United States and the Provinces of on their memory, and writes about them. British North America, acting, of course, Madame de Sévigné's passion for her daugh- through the agency of the Imperial Govter, and Madame de Staël's passion for her ernment. At that time separate treaties, father, in all their feminine intensity, strike a as it were, had to be settled with each of vibratory and responsive chord in the breast the Provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, of the painter of their portraits. A short and Nova Scotia. At the present time, any time ago M. Guizot published some papers revived negotiation would be with the new on Madame Récamier, Madame de Rum- Dominion in which all these separate Proford, and others. Excellent as they are in vincial Legislatures are merged. Few their way, they have an astonishing rigour diplomatic acts have ever answered more or coldness of tone compared with the completely the objects sought than this Rewarm and tender appreciativeness of M. ciprocity Treaty of 1854. During the Civil Sainte-Beuve. They serve by contrast to War, however, the Northern States chose point the distinguished skill and feeling to be angry with what they called the symwhich M. Sainte-Beuve brings to these ex-pathy displayed by a certain part of the cellent portraitures, and which, it should be said, he never brings with such heartiness as he does to women, or else to men, like Maurice de Guérin, for instance, with a decisively feminine fibre in them. Nothing stirs him so much as that intense and eloquent sensibility which is most common in gifted women, but yet which M. SainteBeuve's own case forbids us to describe as an exclusively feminine property. Even the second-rate romances of some of his heroines he analyses with the patience of a devotee in presence of saintly relics. One or two good things in a whole volume are ample recompense to him. He reads Madlle. de Meulan's earliest romance, which seems to be passably thin, and is quite happy in culling from it a couple of sayings but a little removed above commonplace. His patience is matchless, only it The repeal has now been in operation for hardly ought to be called patience, because two years and a half. The Canadians have it can scarcely be said to involve strain wisely concerned themselves in consolidaor effort, but is only a kind of prolonged ting their own resources. They have carbrooding. He talks of Madame de Sé-ried to a successful issue the great internal vigné's letters. Let the reader, he says, "take up and read in course the ten volumes of her correspondence, to follow out,

Canadian population with the Confederates. Other sections of the more ardent American public persuaded themselves that Canada was ripe for secession from British rule, and would be precipitated into union with the States provided the facilities afforded by the Reciprocity Treaty were at once withdrawn. And a third part, holding the extreme Protectionist views of the Morrillites, were anxious to apply to Canada the regimen of exclusive duties pretty well universal in all parts of the fiscal legislation of Congress. In March, 1866, therefore, the Treaty was put an end to rudely and obstinately. The Canadians did all they could by negotiations and argument to avert the change, but they met with very scant civility.

measure of a single Dominion Executive and Parliament, and they have worked assiduously to free their Tariff and their Excise

from impediments and imperfections. They traversed by American trade in a confused have left the Americans to themselves, and and critical state-and it has certainly exthe Americans have already profited by cited in Canada a spirit the reverse of their own observations and reflections, for friendly to the Washington Government. one of the closing acts of the Congress just prorogued has been to instruct the Foreign Relations Committee to institute negotiations for a new Reciprocity Treaty.

As regards the navigation of the St. Lawrence, Mr. Brega's language is marked by the stilted exaggeration in which his countrymen almost always speak of the capabiliIn February last, Congress directed ties of their Continent. In substance, howMr. George W. Brega to inquire into ever, it is true, as he alleges, that the rapid the facts of the case. Mr. Brega pre-growth of the North-Western region is rapsented a first report at the end of March idly converting the St. Lawrence Valley and a second report in May, and Congress has considered both documents of sufficient importance to be made the subject of a second official edition of five thousand copies.

Mr. Brega goes at length and with sufficient industry and intelligence, but not with any striking ability or force, into the merits and facts of the problem, and he finds them in the main to be sufficiently simple. Canada, he finds, produces certain kinds of commodities-for example, particular kinds of lumber and grain, which the United States does not produce within itself; and the only effect of the repeal of the Treaty and the imposition of high duties on the American side of the Border has been to compel the American public to bear all these additional burdens itself.

into the predominant route to the Atlantic shore, and it is the progress of this change which in a few years will render the Intercolonial Railway between Halifax and Quebec an essential link in the chain of communication between East and West. "The free navigation," says Mr. Brega," of the St. Lawrence is a matter of necessity to the immense growth of the great North-West. Already the various channels of communications for the produce of that vast territory to tide-water, where it seeks the markets of the world, are crowded beyond their capacity at certain periods. No artificial communications, no matter upon how liberal a scale they may be constructed, will be sufficient for the almost immediate future. Apart from the question of direct trade between the upper lakes and Europe, "It cannot be denied", says Mr. Brega, the existing communication even with its that whatever amount of these products limited Canals is of the last importance. It were purchased for consumption in the is not exaggerating its consequence to asUnited States since March, 1866, were pur-sume that even a war for the possession of chased at as high prices in the Canadian markets as before the abrogation of the Treaty and that the American consumer was compelled to pay the American duty in addition."

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Mr. Brega also finds that the Smugglerthat most active and useful instructor of mediæval political economists-has been vigorously at work on the Canadian frontier, redressing with eminent success the blunders of Mr. Morrill and his friends. It would be easy to produce many amusing stories of the triumph of Contraband ingenuity over official requirements-but it is enough to say that the boundary line is a thousand miles long, the duties 30 per cent., and the Custom House officers badly paid; and the imagination must be dull indeed which cannot fill in the picture.

In every department of their relations with Canada the repeal of the Treaty has done harm to the States. It has disorganised their fishing trade-it has left the arrangements under which the St. Lawrence is

the right to the natural outlet of our great Lakes and the fertile teeming territory they drain would be less costly to us in its consequences than the loss which the closing of that outlet to our products would entail."

Everybody interested in Canada will be delighted to read this high official appreciation of the St. Lawrence Route, and to hear that an "immediate future" is upon us when it will be taxed to the limit of its capacity. But Mr. Brega is needlessly excited when he suggests a resort even to war in order to maintain the international character of the River. He may depend upon it that the Canadians understand too well the causes which are rapidly raising Montreal into rivalry with New York, to be at all desirous to hinder in the smallest degree the covering of the St. Lawrence with the ships of all nations and pre-eminently of his own. What the lower courses of the Rhine have been and are to Holland, such are the lower courses of the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Canada. In the long line of traffic between Europe and the interior of

North America, there must be depôts and sailed northwards as far as latitude 814 deresting places-points where the two grees on the open sea between Greenland streams dissolve into each other-popu- and Spitzbergen; and, before his time, lous busy cities, inhabited by shrewd men of capital, forwarders, exchange dealers, brokers, and the like, who thrive vigorously by facilitating the passage of the tide of merchandise to and fro. It is the last thought of these men to go to war with their best customers and so Mr. Brega will find when he comes to negotiate the New Treaty with the Ministers of the Dominion at Ottawa.

Cabot had penetrated so far north on the same track, in the search for a north-western passage, that he formed the design of making a journey to the North Pole (a lo del Polo Arctico) at some future period. Scoresby found that the North Atlantic Ocean is exceedingly deep in these parts. Unless our memory deceive us, he could not reach the bottom with a mile and more of line when far to the north of Spitzbergen. In 1827 Sir Edward Parry attempted In the meantime, the confessions of this to reach the North Pole over the ice-fields useful American State Paper are one lesson which had hindered the progress of Hudson more to the pyramid of examples which and Scoresby. Sailing as far north as he have already taught a large part of mankind could from Spitzbergen, he landed his crew that the best thing which Governments can on the apparently solid ice-fields, and comdo for Trade is to leave it untouched either menced his celebrated "boat-and-sledge by Treaties, Tariffs, or "intelligent super-expedition towards, the North Pole. intendence" of any kind whatever.

From The Spectator.

THE NORTH POLAR EXPEDITIONS.

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large reward had been offered to the party if they should succeed in reaching the parallel of 85°. Everything seemed to promise success, and they had already attained within about 160 miles of the last-named latitude, or within 850 miles of the North Pole, WE have probably received the last news when Sir Edward Parry began to notice a we shall have for many months to come re- singular and disheartening circumstance. specting the Expeditions which have been He found that the northerly progress of his sent from Germany and Sweden to the Arc- party by no means corresponded with the tic Seas. The German expedition sailed rate at which they were traversing the ice. under the command of Captain Köldewey Gradually the deficiency increased, until at in the Germania. After an unsuccessful length he found that although they were attempt to make the eastern shore of Green- travelling fifteen miles a day over the iceland in latitude 75° the Germania sailed field, they were actually making no progfurther north, and finding the shores of ress whatever towards the North Pole of Greenland encumbered with enormous ice- the earth. The whole ice-field was being fields compacted together by long continued steadily carried southwards, like an enoreasterly winds, she would seem to have mous ship, before the northerly winds which pushed her way round the fields in a north-had for several days opposed the advance easterly direction, since the last intelligence of Parry and his crew. we have respecting her describes her as having attained north latitude 804 degrees, in east longitude 5 degrees. Reference to a map of the North Polar regions will show that she is now some 120 miles from the north-western extremity of Spitzbergen. She was sailing in a northerly direction when last spoken.

The modern theory respecting the Arctic regions is that there extends for many degrees on every side of the North Pole a sea which is almost free from ice in summer. It is supposed by some that this sea communicates with the North Atlantic Ocean, while others imagine that enormous barriers of fixed ice, if not even of solid land, surThe Swedish expedition has been some-round the Polar Sea on every side. In what less successful. It arrived at Bear Island seventeen days after the German expedition, and remained there five days. When last heard of the Swedish ship was in north latitude 80 degrees.

1854-5 Dr. Kane traced Kennedy Channel as far north as 81° 22′; and to the northeast he saw an open sea extending as far as the eye could reach. "Its waves," says Captain Maury, "were dashing on the The two ships are following a course beach with the swell of a boundless ocean. which many of the old Arctic navigators The tides ebbed and flowed in it, and I appursued unsuccessfully, but which yet ap- prehended that the tidal wave from the Atpears, on the whole, to present a more fa-lantic could no more pass under the icy vourable prospect of success than any other barrier to be propagated in the seas beyond which could be devised. In 1607 Hudson than the vibrations of a musical string can

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