vere.

talents for the benefit of mankind. Intellectual triumphs, like martial victories, may undoubtedly be more dazzling than useful. When we bring Bossuet to this test our judgment must be seTried as a literary artist, who produced the finest models of the sublime and pathetic in French literature; who enriched his native tongue with many noble forms of expression; who invented, in fact, a grand language; his influence has been great, and all the homage that great intellects could render to his merit has been given him alike by friend and foe: but the homage of the intellect is poor indeed, when compared with the homage of the heart; that nameless yearning which is felt towards the real guides and benefactors of man amid the perplexities of his earthly career, which overleaps time and space, and grows broader and deeper as it falls from generation to generation. Bossuet himself, with his superb contempt of mere literary display, would, if his great shade were to appear among us, refuse to be judged as a mere artist; he would demand to stand or fall by his worth as a theologian, a moralist, a prelate, a politician, and a citizen,

As a bishop we search in vain for evidence that he attempted to use his high position and authority to moderate the vain love of ostentation, the ruinous love of war and glory which rendered his master the disturber of the peace of Europe and the devastator of France, by impoverishing her cities and her plains, and starving her people. We search in vain for the manly and Christian warnings of the remonstrance of Fénélon *, or the severe lesson given to kings and nobles by Massillon in Le 'petit Carême.'

It cannot be said he stood erect, in the face of abused power, a mediator between the angry voice of the people and the purple tyranny of kings. It cannot be said,

Illum non populi fasces nec purpura regum
Flexit.'

On the contrary, he possessed a large share of the courtier spirit. He was accused of it by others, and in part confessed it himself. On one occasion, Madame de Maintenon called him the dupe of the Court; and on another he said to the superiors of a • What convent, on quitting them, 'Daughters, pray for me.'

*Le peuple même (il faut tout dire) qui vous a tant aimé, qui a eu tant de confiance en vous, commence à perdre l'amitié, la confiance, et même le respect. Vos conquêtes et vos victoires ne le rejouissent plus; il est plein d'aigreur et de désespoir. La sédition s'allume peu a peu de toutes parts. Ils croient que vous n'avez aucune pitié de leurs maux, que vous n'aimez que votre autorité et votre gloire.' (Letter of Fénélon to Louis XIV.)

shall we pray for?' "Que je n'aie pas tant de complaisance 'pour le monde. Yes, Bossuet had more complaisance for the foibles and follies of the great, their ruinous extravagances and intolerant pride, than for the importunate voice of noble aspirations, and the despairing cry of the lowly and just whose rights were trampled on and privileges annihilated. As a politician and a citizen his influence was pernicious, and was deeply felt in the succeeding age; and the haughty disdain which he professed for political speculation, the marvellous subservience of so great a spirit to the principles of unlimited obedience, the authority of his great example, deterred his countrymen from forming habits of political thought, served to rivet on his country the fetters of autocracy, and left it when the chains were loosened, like an unarmed slave, with limbs powerless from long inaction, exposed to the assaults of theory and licence.

We have no English Bossuet, and we have reason to be, thankful that our national life was never so concentrated in the palace as to give a pre-eminence to the court pulpit sufficient to sustain such lofty flights of rhetorical magniloquence. But England produced in that same age a genius of grander and more truly religious soul, greater in his aspirations, and more noble in his life,a man who never crooked the hinges of the knee to power; who raised his eloquent voice again and again in behalf of unviolated liberty of thought and conscience; who endeavoured to forward the reign of God's justice upon earth; who, blind, old, deserted, clung with unquenchable ardour to the cause that was despised by the court, scorned by the great, and despaired of by the people; a name that will be as dear as his works to the most distant posterity, who was great and good, whether considered as Christian, poet, politician, or patriot. If France has her Bossuet, England has her Milton. The genius of one and of the other bears the same stamp of massive grandeur; the eloquence of one and of the other rose to sublimity and pierced the veil of mortality. But the French orator was the champion of authority and of the Church of Rome; the English poet was the child of freedom and of sacred truth; and if the works of Bossuet stand as proud memorials of the Court and Creed he adorned, the writings of Milton breathe an immortal spirit which changes of opinion will never consign to the records of the past, and which the revolutions of the world will never efface.

ART. VIII.-Histoire des Livres Populaires, ou de la Littérature du Colportage, depuis le XVme Siècle jusqu'à l'Etablissement de la Commission de l'Examen des Livres du Colportage (30 Novembre 1852). Par M. CHARLES NISARD, Secrétaireadjoint de la Commission. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1854.

A LTHOUGH the subject of this History of popular literature

is exclusively French, it is impossible not to regard it as full of significance in reference to the same important class of publications in England. The laws which regulate the popular mind follow everywhere the same general analogies. Ignorance and superstition may be everywhere traced to the same sources; and the revolting examples of both which have come to light in the course of more than one criminal trial in England during the last year, are a painful evidence of the prevalence among ourselves of the same causes which are disclosed in M. Nisard's publication.

Few, even among the best informed readers of the literature of the day, will be prepared for the fact, that, side by side with the known productions of the press of Paris, there has existed from time immemorial in France another, and in its own sphere, hardly less influential, literature, addressing a totally different public, enjoying a separate and peculiar circulation, and possessing an organisation, both for production and for distribution, almost entirely independent of the ordinary machinery of literary commerce. Still less will they be prepared to learn that the number of volumes thus annually put into circulation throughout the length and breadth of France, amounts to nearly ten millions, at prices ranging from a franc down to a sous; or for the still more extraordinary fact, that, among this enormous number, with the exception of a few of the modern novels, hardly a single volume-at least in the form in which it is circulated by the hawkers-is the production of any writer whose works have ever attracted the attention of our readers. So that we

are led to the singular conclusion that a substratum of publications, of enormous extent, supplies the demand and feeds the curiosity of the lower orders, utterly unconnected with the higher creations of French genius, coarser in form and in substance, and very slightly affected by the vicissitudes of taste and opinion.

Such is the Littérature du Colportage'-for more than three centuries almost the sole intellectual nutriment of the rural

population of France, and of that large section of the population of towns and cities who retain, unchanged and unmodified, all their provincial habits, peculiarities, and prejudices. Isolated, like the primitive class to whose rude tastes it ministers, from all the influences of the age, a large body of this literature has remained for three centuries almost entirely unimproved; whatever of modern infusion may, from time to time, have been introduced, has insensibly glided into the old channels; and of very many of the books now actually in circulation, it is no exaggeration to say, that (allowing for certain inevitable disparities) they are all but identical with their predecessors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the same in subject-matter, the same in spirit and tone, the same in form of publication, the same even in the mechanical details of typography; the very texture and colour of the old paper is retained, and the illustrations presented in each successive year are exact reproductions of the rude woodcuts which adorned the original impressions.

Strange and inexplicable as this immobility may at first sight appear, it is a natural consequence of the habits and position of the class to which these rude publications are addressed, and will be found, in a greater or less degree, to characterise the rustic literature of most countries. The Volks-bücher of the Germans bear a striking similarity to the Livres 'Populaires' described by M. Nisard; and, like them, have been reproduced for successive generations with hardly a pretence of alteration. The same books, with a few local or national peculiarities, are found to have been current for immemorial years, in the other continental countries - Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, and even Switzerland. Many of the very same publications still maintain their old popularity among ourselves, against all the attractions of our various societies for the diffusion of knowledge; and, not to speak of 'Prophetic Almanacs,' Celestial Intelligencers,' and similar works, it may be said that the most popular in some respects of all the almanacs in use among our people-the well-known 'Moore's Almanac'-is not, in its issue for the present year, many steps of real progress in advance of the Shepherds' 'Kalendar' printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1493.

6

It would be a highly interesting study to trace, as has already been done for several of these countries separately, the general analogies of the People's Books' of the various nations, eastern and western; and to determine how far each has influenced or been influenced by the other. But M. Nisard's plan, which was directed towards one specific object, did not include any such inquiry. He confines himself to the popular

books of France, and indeed chiefly to their actual condition and character as they are in circulation at the present day.

With that superior energy and decision which, whatever be its other characteristics, have marked the administration of the present Emperor of the French, a commission was issued (on the 30th November, 1852), by M. Maupas, the Minister of Police, with power to call in and examine all the books that form part of that body of cheap literature which is circulated by colportage. It is hardly necessary to say, that by colportage is meant the system of licensed hawking or pedling, by which, in France, as in other countries, the secluded districts are supplied with the various commodities which form the object of this primitive species of locomotive trade. Among these the little books already referred to constitute a very notable item; and their production is a special branch of the book-trade in France. The publishing for colportage is carried on not so much in Paris, as in three or four great provincial centres, Troyes, Chatillon-sur-Seine, Nancy, Montpellier and Epinal; between these various establishments an active rivalry has been maintained, marked by all the same features which characterise the higher book-trade, — piracies, injunctions, questions of copyright, and angry suits at law. In two of these great depôts at Troyes, some of the publications were supplied to customers not by number but by weight;almanacs being actually sold by the kilogramme!

The reader may imagine the excitement and alarm produced in these primitive regions by the first injunction issued under the Imperial Commission, requiring that all books designed for sale through the colportage should be forthwith sent in for examination; accompanied by a notification that, henceforward, in addition to the hawker's licence already required for his general trade, every book offered by him for sale should be provided with a special stamp of authorisation! Books came pouring in with a rapidity which those will best understand who have seen, under any of the arbitrary governments abroad, how the habitually tardy operations of individual enterprise are quickened by the impulse of an order from the higher powers. M. Nisard (who, indeed, maintains a studied reserve on many very important particulars) does not state the exact number; but we learn from a very interesting lecture On the Home Education ' of the Poor,' delivered some time since at St. Martin's Hali, by Cardinal Wiseman (to whom M. Nisard had supplied this and other details), that, before the date of that lecture, no less than 7500 books had been submitted to the judgment of the Commission!