tick of the watch records a human death. Madame de Sévigné adorned a pure and virtuous life with perfect freedom of thought and expression. Solemnity often makes outward constraint the cloak of hidden vice. Which would you have? It is not given to all to have Madame de Sévigné's virtue any more than her genius. But if vices there must be, let us at all events have the consolation of putting hypocrisy among the number. Slavery one might endure for the sake of insuring virtue. But as it proves to be no security against vice, at all events let us not decry the blessings of a nobler and more beautiful freedom. How earnest Madame de Sévigné was with all her liberty of thought, how unconscious of any reprehensible levity, we see in the continuation of the same letter. A little farther on she says with the same energetic simplicity:

"I am reading M. Nicole with a delight which lifts me off my feet; above all, I am enchanted with the third essay, Of the Means of Preserving Peace with all Men. Read it, do, I entreat you, with attention, and see how clearly it displays the heart, and how everybody is there, philosophers, Jansenists, Molinists, all the world, in short. What is called looking down into the bottom of the heart with a lantern, he does it: he displays to us what we think every day, and what we havn't the wits to unravel, or the candour to confess; in short, I have never seen writing as those gentlemen can write (ces Messieurs-là). Without the consolation of our readings, we should die of the blues in no time; it rains for ever.

It would be, if we could perform it properly, a delightful undertaking to travel with the reader through Madame de Sévigné's letters, for there is hardly any kind of intellectual enjoyment which they do not offer at some point or other.

But our space is exhausted, nor will our readers think it necessary that we should enter into any further account of her life. Indeed, the last years of her life, when the shadow of death begins to peer over the pages of the admirable old lady, are rather sad than otherwise. Not that her own spirits flagged, or that the beauty and mellowness of her character grew less. On the contrary, the fame of the amiability and genius of the loveable old woman kept spreading abroad until all educated France seems to have been drawn within its influence, and when four years before the close of the century the disease which at that time was the terror of all Europe suddenly falls upon her with the terrible fatality with which it seems to have attacked her family, the reader feels a nameless sort of literary blank, as if the knell of the century itself had rung, and the day of great things had passed away in the person

of a friend. Madame de Sévigné died on the 17th of April 1696, in her seventieth year, of the small pox. The dread of the infection was so great that her mortal remains were immediately hurried-we had almost said huddled-into the grave. It was not even thought safe to put the coffin into the family vault, but a grave was dug and bricked up with solid masonry in the choir by the side of the altar. For many years she had expressed her extreme dread of death with her usual simplicity to her daughter. But when death came, she was found calm, collected, and composed. Nine years later the same disease, which had killed the mother, killed the daughter, so that even in this curious aspect, they who had been so united in their lives were united in their deaths. Would the knowledge of this singular coincidence have touched Madame de Sévigne's heart on her deathbed could she have known of it? We cannot doubt that the thought would have moved her deeply, even in death. Did it affect Madame de Grignan as it would have affected her mother? This is a question which it would be hard to answer in the affirmative.

"Madame de Grignan," says St. Simon, "beauté vieille et précieuse, mourut à Marseilles, et quoiqu'en ait dit Madame de Sévigné dans ses lettres, fort peu regrettée de son mari, de sa famille, et des Provençéaux."

But he adds:

"La beauté, et plus encore l'agrément et l'esprit avoient donné de la réputation à Madame de Grignan, en quoi toutefois elle étoit infiniment surpassée par Madame de Sévigné sa mère, dont le naturel, et une sorte de simplicité et de grâces, comme à la dérobée d'elle, rendoient son commerce délicieux; elle n'avait ni le pincé, ni le précieux de sa fille."

If in this article we may seem to have wandered a little too much from the central figure into gossip and disquisition, we plead guilty at once to the charge, but our apology is, that Madame de Sévigné's letters have so often been treated by English reviewers, that there seemed to be some little excuse for leaving the more beaten track. At the same time we warn our readers against falling too easily into the belief that they will find Madame de Sévigné's life a dry and hackneyed topic, if only they will take the trouble to enter into it minutely and at leisure. To do so in the limits of an article would be impossible. There is indeed something a little arid and uninviting even in the bare mention of the Siècle Louis XIV. But if we leave the beaten ground of history aside, and ake the trouble to mix with the actors themselves in their daily life,

the scene changes as by enchantment, and we find ourselves suddenly transplanted to a magic circle, where every human interest with which we are familiar is worked out upon a scale of freedom, vigour, and brilliancy, sufficient to arrest the attention and enthral the imagination of the dullest capacity.

It only remains that we should say a few words upon the excellent edition of Madame de Sévigné's letters mentioned at the head of this article, and now in course of publication. We have nine very fine octavo volumes before us, which bring us down to the year 1690, six years before the death of Madame de Sévigné. The remainder of the letters will follow in due time. The last volume will contain an Analytical Table, comprising a complete index of proper names and places, institutions, customs, and a Dictionary of all the idioms peculiar either to Madame de Sévigné or to her time. There will also be a Bibliographical notice. In connection, moreover, with this edition, will be published a collection of 137 steel engravings, taken from portraits in the palace of Versailles of the celebrities mentioned in Madame de Sévigné's letters. This collection of portraits, however, must be purchased separately, but if properly executed, and we trust the publishers will spare no pains to insure the utmost fidelity, it will evidently be an addition of matchless interest. The life of Madame de Sévigné by M. Mesnard, an author honourably known in France by his History of the French Academy, is singularly complete, drawn with a firm and delicate hand, and a minute knowledge and discrimination. Those who wish to know more about this author will find a criticism of his history of the academy at the end of the third volume of M. Rigault's Essays. It will thus be seen that these editions of the great writers of France lay claim to be final, exhaustive so far as our present knowledge permits, and fully on a level with the ambitious nature of the undertaking. The publishers are prepared to employ the best talent of France. We hasten to add, that in the case of Madame de Sévigné's letters, the present collection differs largely and most materially from all other collections, in three most important particulars. In the first place, it contains a large number of unpublished letters. In the second place, all the letters of the older editions, which had been largely doctored to suit each particular period and the fancies of each day have in all cases where it was possible been restored to the exact original, a restoration, which in a large portion of the work, amounts in fact to a positive resurrection, in other words, to the publication of totally new materials. Finally, the whole of the materials for annotation lovingly collected by the well-known M. Monmerqué for his second edition of the letters, have passed

into the hands of the publishers and been by them applied to the present edition, thus securing the labours of the man best acquainted with the subject.. What the total number of the volumes will be when the work is complete, whether ten or a dozen, we cannot quite tell. They will be worth purchasing, whatever their number. They will certainly exceed the capacity of the pocket of the charming girl, "who has made up her mind to become a more charming woman," but they will stand very well upon her shelf, and the next time she coaxes somebody to give her a present we recommend her to ask for them all, and to stipulate expressly that she may get the collection of portraits besides. We hope the binding will be neat, not gaudy, but with a noble simplicity about it. Is there no translation in English of Madame de Sévigné's letters? and if not, why not? They are a school for writing in any language. But then who is to translate them?

ART. VIII.—THE FUNCTIONS OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME.

MANY objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks of mine on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth; a proposition about criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said that "of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, had been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.' I added, that owing to the operation in English literature of certain causes, "almost the last thing for which one would come to English literature was just that very thing which now Europe most desires-criticism;" and that the power and value of English literature was thereby impaired. More than one rejoinder declared that the importance I here assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort. And the other day, having been led by an excellent notice of Wordsworth published in the North British Review, to turn again to his biography, I found, in the words of this great man, whom I, for one, must always listen to with the profoundest respect, a sentence passed on the critic's business, which seems

to justify every possible disparagement of it. Wordsworth says in one of his letters:

"The writers in these publications" (the Reviews), "while they prosecute their inglorious employment, cannot be supposed to be in a state of mind very favourable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure as genuine poetry."

And a trustworthy reporter of his conversation quotes a more elaborate judgment to the same effect:.

"Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the inventive; and he said to-day that if the quantity of time consumed in writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of others; a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless."

It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the greater good of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in another. Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the composition of the "false or malicious criticism," of which Wordsworth speaks. However, everybody would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better never have been written. Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a general proposition, that the critical faculty is lower than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employment; is it true that all time given to writing critiques on the works of others would be much better employed if it were given to original composition, of whatever kind this may be? Is it true that Johnson had better have gone on producing more Irenes instead of writing his Lives of the Poets; nay, is it certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed in making his Ecclesiastical Sonnets, than when he made his celebrated Preface, so full of criticism, and criticism of the works of others? Wordsworth was himself a great critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has not left us more criticism; Goethe was one of the greatest of critics, and we may sincerely congratulate ourselves that he has left us so much criticism. Without wasting time over the exaggeration which Wordsworth's judgment on criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the causes-not difficult I think to be traced-which may have led Wordsworth to this exaggeration, a critic may with advantage seize an occasion for trying his own conscience, and for asking himself of what real service, at any given moment, the practice