and it smoothed the way to perilous facility when she really had it in mind to teach somebody not to call again. She confessed, or one might more properly say she avowed, that she was deliberate ly impolite to persons whom she desired to keep off the premises, and more than once she was betrayed by her lack of forethought into insults whose enormity is to be shuddered at. But usually her freedom, when youth had ceased to excuse and grace it, had no worse effect than self-indulgence in whim or prejudice, and it made her, more than any other of her qualities, an entertaining person. She was, as the phrase goes, real; and reality in this sense implies a habit of self-assertion, a tendency to fly in the face of conventions, a hatred of hypocrisies, and some essential originality for the sake of which society allows its forms to be snubbed. Perhaps this individuality of Madame Mohl has been excessively dwelt upon by her biographer, for it embodies the irreconcilable element in her, that which society and experience could not subdue; but on the other hand, she spent her life in the effort to please others, with the conscious aim to provide agreeable social intercourse for brilliant men and women, and this she declared was all that life was worth living for. "Au fond il n'y a que cela ! "

That is the true French spirit, the motto of the salon; and whatever proportion of the British eccentricity remained in Madame Mohl's heart, she must have suffered a very complete Parisian naturalization before she could sum up life in a maxim which in relation to its whole range is so utterly provincial. It was an accident that the mistress of this drawing-room was English by birth, for the realm she commanded was unmistakably French; at most, her extraction served only to make her salon Parisian in the sense in which Paris is larger than France, is comprehensive of foreign elements and, as we VOL. LVII. — NO. 342.

36

say, cosmopolitan. This distinction was heightened, too, by the fact that her husband was a German. The consequence of this curious blending of the three great national strains was that her rooms gathered in the eminent people of the intellectual world; her apartments had the advantage of a city situated at the confluence of three great rivers; and this is to be taken into the account if one seeks the secret of her success. The entrée there was to society which intellectual persons liked to meet. This, of course, was not all. The qualities which originally established the rendezvous in those quarters, and maintained its fitness and agreeableness for the purpose, count for much more in the problem. Into this it is, perhaps, not worth while to go, though the matter has been much debated; and no one, certainly, can lay down this volume without silently asking how it was that Madame Mohl obtained and kept her sceptre. It may not be quite superfluous, however, to remind ourselves that in the dynasty of society inheritance plays a considerable rôle. Madame Mohl had been a promising candidate for the succession from the time when she was the only person who could relieve Châteaubriand's tedium vitæ; his election lighted upon her, and the favor of Madame Récamier and the Princess Belgiojoso was a powerful alliance, and her own gifts drew about her the clever young men. When the salon was fairly set up all this helped, and in the friendship of Fauriel, Ampère, and Mohl the crucial point was safely met; and after that, the queen and the chief courtiers being provided, the rooms filled up as a matter of course. At the end, habit and the well-worn "Do you remember?" of old acquaintances kept the tea simmering till that last Friday, when for the first time Madame Mohl was too weary to make it, and asked the faithful Barthélémy St. Hilaire, who seems like a ghost of days past, to assist her. But before this consummation, she had out

lived her reign. She complained that no one came to see her. She confessed she was unable to be alone. She had, in fact, reached the last stage of all when there was no longer any one to please. Her desertion, for which her friends were little to blame, since they had merely gone over to death, seems rather pitiable, and its discomfort is increased by the emphasis with which her weaknesses, both of mind and temper, are brought out at the close. Her old age is not attractive; not so much from her own defects as because time deprived her of the milieu which was to her the whole of life, and did not supply her with the entourage in which alone old age is beautiful. Few scenes in this volume stand out with the sharpness of that in which she is seen at Père La Chaise," the aged widow sitting, one cold morning, on a high spot, and looking on from a distance while they carried her husband's coffin from its temporary resting-place to the grave she had made ready for it, and then stealing quietly away, weeping under her black veil, and returning unseen to the desolate home." One remembers this same woman skipping about from chair to chair to find her shoes, or seated on the mantel-piece in talk with her friends; and, on the whole, he thinks that the process of growing old was never more relentlessly set down than in these pages.

It is the climax of the disagreeable, to one who believes that the ends of life are served by being entertaining to one's friends, to find the pleasant chat ending at the dumb headstone and the silence under it. But such a one is to be judged within the limits of his own philosophy and by his own ideal. It ought to be insisted on, amid these lugubrious reflections in which the example of the biographer has led us to indulge, that if Madame Mohl thought that the chief end of woman was to please, this was not in her conception a small thing.

The standard of pleasure in her salon was a high one. It was naturally mainly intellectual, and if, as is allowed, the talk was not stimulating, it was the best in some respects that Paris afforded; for the men who frequented there were solid as well as brilliant. And in the days of the Empire and the Celui-ci, whom, true child of Madame Récamier and Madame de Staël, Madame Mohl hated, it was an inspiriting thing to know that in the midst of the tide of flattery and luxury and the worship of a vulgar success there was one hearth of the intellectual monde which kept to plain living and high thinking, and suffered no desertion from its learned and self-respecting circle. Then, too, one is much struck, in these records of the little society which formed the nucleus of the gathering, with the fact that though brains were essential to membership in it, the heart also had a well-recognized share in the universal labor of pleasuregiving. The attachment of the male friends, of Mohl and Ampère, of Fauriel and Manzoni, is the source of delightful episodes; but the love of madame herself for Fauriel and for her husband, and her interest in the advancement and temporal welfare of others more or less closely connected with her group, deserve constant remembrance, if one would do justice to her. For, to use another of those popular phrases which mean so much more than they seem to express, she was as human as she was real. Perhaps one cannot follow that end of "pleasing” his fellow-mortals so long and so consistently, without being humanized; for it is mainly by association that individuals come to share in that abstraction, humanity which is so much larger than any life in the concrete. The power of sympathy and the habit of its exercise must be the fond, as Madame Mohl has it; but society in its general sense is the field in which the quality of humaneness flourishes. It was so with Madame Mohl,

at all events; and for our part, it is much more to our taste to have these solid virtues of her salon impressed upon our memory than to read the catalogue of her oddities. Queer she was, no doubt; but it seems to us too much has been made of this in comparison with her other characteristics. There is, we fear, a touch of mere Boswellianism in this volume, interesting, truthful, but not a little damaging. At the end we come back to our first remark: the book gains by the individuality of its subject, but it is after all rather a substitute for the history of the salon, which truly could not be written. What is presented to us is a portrait of a woman of very high human interest, both for her own nature and for her affiliations with the genius and talent of her day; but it strikes the eye more than the mind. There is in the concluding passages of the work a strain of moralizing that indicates an imperfection of sympathy with Madame Mohl's ideal, though there is never a lack of true respect for her character and care for her memory. We have, indeed, almost a sermon on the text of

the vanity of vanities, in connection with that remark already quoted, that to please is all there is to life. We do not object to the little disquisition nor to its teaching. It is cited merely to illustrate the spirit in which the volume is conceived, which is thoroughly English. In it Madame Mohl is more picturesque than attractive, more entertaining than respected. One continually has a feeling that it was in spite of much that is told here that Madame Mohl was liked; but the thing for which she was sought after is nowhere to be found. The biographer seems herself puzzled to discover her fascination; but notwithstanding the defective grasp of a character which must have passed through many changes in a long and active life, the writer has succeeded in telling the story as well, perhaps, as the inherent difficulties of such a task, on which we have already dwelt, will permit. The salon in question will never be so famous as its predecessors, but it will remain an object of interest in the literary memoirs of the period of Louis Philippe and of the Second Empire.

THE undertaking of the French publisher who, in issuing the first of a series of bulky volumes under the general title of Le Monde Pittoresque et Monumental, announces that it is but the beginning of a collection "qui comprendra le monde entier" can be fitly called stupendous. It shows that French readers are interesting themselves now in foreign countries more than they have been reputed to do, and, if we may judge fairly from the text and pictures in the first book of the set, which treats of

1 Le Monde Pittoresque et Monumental. L'Angleterre, l'Ecosse, et l'Irlande. Par P. VILLAKS.

England, Scotland, and Ireland, their interest in the physical or outward aspects, at least, of other lands and peoples than their own is sure to be stimulated by the lively, picturesque, intelligent, and comprehensive records made by authors and artists alike. It is hardly to be expected that a French writer, in analyzing the social life and institutions of England, should be able wholly to divest himself of national prejudices which have been nourished by centuries of mutual hostility, but we must do Mr.

4 cartes et 600 gravures. Paris: A. Quantin. 1885.

Villars the justice to say that he appears to be thoroughly acquainted with his subject, and that he uniformly tries to be fair and candid, although, as he admits, “between the English and French tempers there is a vast gulf, which may not always be crossed even by those who best know the character of the two races." He gives a very animated account of the multifarious life of London and its suburbs, to which one third of the space in the work is devoted. There is a particularly readable and discriminating passage about the great newspapers, their history, policy, and the general character of their contents. Perhaps Londoners may be surprised when they are told that their "cabbies" purposely run over pedestrians, and laugh at the victims (vide page 8); but, as if in compensation for the few harmless exaggerations of which this is an example, the author's exhaust ive description of a typical London home is a model of scrupulous and vivid realism. There is something wellnigh encyclopædic in the scope of Mr. Villars' work; almost nothing is left to the imagination. It is not otherwise when, leaving London, he begins to "do" the provinces: with the utmost system and an indefatigable vivacity he tells us all about the mills and the mines, the universities and the castles, the scenery of the coasts, of the lakes, of the Scotch highlands, and of the Green Isle, with every visible detail of commercial and social existence. All this is interesting, not because it is written from the point of view of the moralist, his torian, or critic, but simply because it comes from a close observer whose own interest in his theme never flags.

That prolific artist, the sun, sending his rays through a camera, is responsible primarily for a great majority of the six hundred illustrations, and the same agent has been freely employed in the engraving of the plates. We hasten to add that photography has seldom been

more artistically applied to the purposes of book illustration. Many of the subjects seem to have been photographed first, then redrawn with pen and ink or crayon, and the photogravures are made from these drawings. They have been selected with much taste, and the execution is generally satisfactory, in some instances even better than that of most wood-engravers. Marked improvements have been made everywhere lately in mechanical processes of engraving, but nowhere has such approximate perfection been attained as in France, where the production of exact fac-similes of the original drawings is a result upon which all illustrators are to be congratulated. In a large proportion of the pictures in question, clear and delicate flat tints of all shades of gray have been got by the use of drawing-paper, on which such tints have been printed, and from which the lights are scraped out by the artist. This is a common device, but it is sometimes abused, and is seldom so skillfully applied as in this case, where (as in Mr. Deroy's drawing of the Tower, from the Thames, page 21) several tints of gray, shading from the lightest to the darkest, are laid on with apparent freedom and give a great deal of color. On the very next page the process is more clearly revealed, in the cut of St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, where the fine intersecting lines which originally covered the whole surface of the drawing-paper have been entirely scraped out for the white clouds in the sky, and for the highest lights on the chimneys, parapet, salient parts of the rough wall, and other places where pure white is required; while in still other places the same network of lines has been partially erased, as in the darker portions of the sky. The lower righthand corner of the plate represents the value which at first covered the draughtsman's paper, and from which he has worked up to his lights by the use of the scraper, and down to his darks by

the use of pen and ink. This is very neatly and knowingly done. It would be easy to point out many clever applications of this method, but we need only to mention the illustrations of St. Paul from Ludgate Hill (page 77), The Albert Embankment (page 139), The Thames at Woolwich (page 205), Hunting in Scotland (page 239), The Bridge and Cathedral of Hereford (page 276), and Penzance (page 508). It is true that examples of the same sort of work which are less successful might be cited, -examples which have the unpleasant mealy textures of lithography, and in which softness has been carried to excess; but as a rule the contrivance works well, especially in the reproduction of architectural compositions. The four admirable blocks in the first chapter on the provinces are from drawings by an American artist, Mr. C. S. Reinhart, cut by American engravers. All the illustrations have had the inestimable advantage of intelligent printing on good paper.

The Vicar of Wakefield has been newly translated into French by Mr.

B. H. Gausseron, and appears in a gay Gallic version,' with many colored illustrations by Mr. V. A. Poirson. We are sorry that we cannot inform our readers exactly how a picture is produced by chromotypographie,- for this is seemingly one of the latest Parisian inventions in the way of book illustrations, but we can speak only of its result, which is a perfect fac-simile of a water-color drawing. It may well be fancied that such pictures give an uncommonly bright and cheerful appearance to the pages of a book. Mr. Poirson is an accomplished draughtsman, and his diminutive figures are full of life and expression; but his coloring is rather too violent, and his love of vermilion is excessive. The dainty initial at the beginning of each chapter, and the highly decorative conceits (consisting of flowers, plants, fruits, birds, etc.) with which he has adorned the borders of his drawings, are very pretty and graceful. may be said in praise of his illustrations that they present the English character of the people, costumes, architecture, and landscape with invariable fidelity.

It

Ir is surprising that it did not long ago occur to the learned world that we ought to have a special dictionary for each successive period of life. Words mean one thing to youth, and quite another to age. There are certain terms in common use which have next to no significance for us until we arrive at years of discretion; and, moreover, that age which is discreet on one subject may not yet have reached that point on another. Words are standing all along the highway of our life, like the bottles sealed with Solomon's seal in the Arabian Nights; the boy sees nothing

in them, but one day or another the seal chips off at the stroke of some hard fact of existence, and out pours the skyobscuring gloom of some tremendous Afrite. Other words there are that have a meaning in youth, to be sure, but a quite distinct one from that of later years. We often wish the young and the old might be more companionable and communicative with each other; but how can they be? They speak a different language. Plainly, the new

1 Oliver Goldsmith. Le Vicaire de Wakefield. Traduction nouvelle et complète. Par B. H. GAUSSERON. Paris: A. Quantin. 1885.