An Englishman has his place in family life, in a locality, in a political system. When he speculates, he never suffers himself to leave the limits of the social sphere. He is content to accept the results of experience, by the acceptance of which practical statesmanship is made possible in a free country. He refers all propositions to the standard of what English institutions will admit. His notions of love and marriage are subordinated to his conception of the exigencies of family life. He wants a religion that will practically work, which real bishops can expound to real public meetings, which will suit the man who desires to be left alone in the bosom of his family, and yet join with his neighbours in occasions of sacred solemnity. But on the Continent there is a large number of persons, especially among those eminent in literature, of whom we may say that each individual seems left to himself. The first principles of every thing are debatable ground to him. He receives aid neither from State nor Church. All that he has to do is to shape his own particular career by reason, by sympathies, by submitting to the teaching of events, by trusting to the protection of that vaguest of deities, le bon Dieu. We cannot abandon our own position, or admit for an instant that things which we fully believe are morally wrong in themselves cease to be wrong because foreigners choose to make light of them. But if we wish to comprehend rather than to condemn, our best road is, by the exercise of what imagination we possess, to throw ourselves into the position assumed by those whom we are criticising, and divesting ourselves of every thing in society and established institutions which shackles or assists us, look on human life with the eyes of a man who has nothing to trust to but the play of his own feelings, the whispers of his own conscience, and the dictates of his own reason.

It is not easy to do this; and after our most honest efforts to understand them, French novels, the most characteristic expression of what we refer to, will remain very different compositions from any that we can fancy ourselves or any of our countrymen to have written. And no writer is at once more typical and more incomprehensible than George Sand. To all the difficulties implied in the fact that she is a French writer of the nineteenth century, we must add those implied in the fact that she is a woman, and what is more, a woman with a philosophical turn of mind. We have no English writer at all resembling her; but we know enough of philosophical ladies generally, to be aware that it requires considerable nicety of perception to distinguish the exact point on which they are speaking, and the precise object which they have in view. Sometimes, in reading George Sand, we might fancy that she had shaped

out a definite system of life and morals for herself, sufficiently ascertained to command her own belief and to become the topic of persuasion to others. Sometimes it seems as if she must be writing for mere writing's sake, meaning nothing, believing nothing, wishing nothing. As a general result, we see that she is possessed with one or two leading ideas. She thinks the world of modern society decidedly wrong on at least two distinct points. Her opinion is clear against the conventional system of marriages, and the established relations of the rich and poor. But when we ask with what she wishes to replace them, we are at sea; we are lost in the beautiful but obscure language of feminine philosophy.

But a person may be vague in thought and language, and yet have a great deal to say, and exercise a great influence by saying it. Every century has stirring within its breast a number of feelings dimly felt, of aspirations imperfectly understood, of desires faintly expressed. It is possible that a writer may acquire a great power by giving utterance to these first flutterings of thought and hope, and may be all the more successful because the utterance has an appropriate feebleness and indistinctness. There is a wide and very vague feeling afloat in the present day that some classes, though it is not known exactly which, have not the fair chance in the world that they ought to have. There is a sort of readiness to take up the cause of sinners, a distrust of respectability, a recoil from the worship of success. Something large and noble seems within the grasp of mortals, if their fellow-men did not step in the way. It is difficult to say that either women or the poor find this the best of all possible worlds. In England, when such a thought arises, we test it by the standard of social institutions. We think whether society does not demand a subordination of sex and rank, and strive to hit on the principles by which this subordination should be regulated and modified. But in a country where problems of thought and morals exist for the individual rather than for society, it is natural to give vent to the sense of injustice without any calculations of expediency, and to believe that there is in man at large that power of quick and radical change which the individual fancies he can recognise in himself. George Sand is one of the prophets who take up this parable, and she has a large number of votaries to sympathise with her.

To this, her primary attraction, she adds others of a secondary but powerful nature. She has a true and a wide appreciation of beauty, a constant command of rich and glowing language, and a considerable faculty of self-analysis and self-reflection. And no one could possess more completely the charm of unreserve. What she thinks she says, without

hesitation or subterfuge. She is undeterred by any regard for the proprieties of her station or her sex. She thus creates an impression of truthfulness which makes us ready to defend her against the numberless attacks of criticism to which she exposes herself. In spite of all her defects, she awakens an admiration which cannot be reasoned away. Her novels are often unmeaning, false to the realities of life, weak in plot, deficient in artistic arrangement, dismally long, tedious, and wearisome to get through; but still they are never poor. They suggest many new thoughts. They are lit up with the glow of genuine feeling. They are stamped with the impress of an indisputable honesty. Such a woman is worth studying, even at the risk of some shock to our moral feeling and our insular prejudices, and under the penalty of some weary hours spent in wading through her rhapsodies.

She has written her life in twenty volumes, and the mere fact that she has done so is characteristic. What has a woman who has done little more than live in a countryhouse in Berry, write novels, and quarrel with her husband, to say, that she must take twenty octavo volumes to express it? The volumes are made up of comments, paradoxes, long evolutions of feeling, digressions religious, philosophical, and historical, criticisms of men and books, and descriptions of scenery. She goes off for twenty pages on the most insignificant and irrelevant subject, and then informs us that it is her way. And yet if we wish to know what George Sand is like, what she thinks, and what she means, we cannot refuse to read so instructive a guide as her autobiography. There is a very visible connection between her writings and her personal history, and we will therefore attempt a sketch of what she tells us of herself in this formidable memoir. We must, however, confine ourselves to noticing those portions of the work which throw most light on the novels which have made her name so widely known. She insists so strongly on the influence which the history of her parents and paternal grandmother had on her, that we will briefly trace its outline; but otherwise we cannot enter on the innumerable details of her childhood and youth which she has thought it expedient to reveal to the public and to sell to her publisher.

Madame Dudevant traces her parentage by the father's side up to royalty. The famous Marshal de Saxe was her great-grandfather; and he was the offspring of Frederic Augustus king of Poland, by the Countess of Koenigsmark. It is not, as Madame Dudevant modestly acknowledges, any very distinguished honour to be numbered among the descendants of this sovereign; for he had several hundred ille

gitimate children. None, however, of his bastards was so famous as the Marshal de Saxe; and Madame Dudevant displays some pride in claiming that coarse but able general as her forefather. The marshal had an intrigue with a lady of the opera, Mademoiselle Verrières; and a daughter was the result of the union. When Aurore de Saxe, as the daughter was called, came to years of discretion, she was married to the Count of Horn. But her husband was soon killed in a duel; and some years afterwards she was again married to M. Dupin de Francueil. This lady, having been twice legally and honourably married, forms a marked exception to the general standard of Madame Dudevant's ancestors, who were mostly accustomed to illicit connections. By M. Dupin she had a son, Maurice Dupin; and Maurice was the father of George Sand.

M. Dupin de Francueil was an elderly man when he married, and for nine years he had no child; at last, when he was upwards of seventy, he was presented by his wife with a son. But he did not do much more than welcome his son into the world; for he died a year after Maurice was born. His widow found herself in circumstances of comparative poverty; for although she had a handsome maintenance, yet she was obliged greatly to retrench the extravagant establishment of her husband. She lived quietly for many years, partly at Paris, and partly in the country, devoting herself to the maternal duties of spoiling her boy and superintending his education. He was placed under the tutelage of a M. François Deschartres; an amiable scientific pedant, who occupies henceforth a very prominent place for many years in the family history. The quiet of the little party was at last rudely shaken by the Revolution of 1789. Madame Dupin, however, who was a warm admirer of Voltaire, looked with as much pleasure as surprise on the first outbreak of popular fury, and delighted in the security of which she herself, as a friend to progress and liberty, was assured. But the hour of misfortune and danger was at hand. The proprietor of the house in which she resided informed her that there were secret hiding-places in the walls, where papers and valuables could be stowed away. She availed herself of the information; but, unfortunately, at the commencement of the Reign of Terror suspicion was excited, and an order was given to search the house. A guard was placed over the apartments occupied by her; but Deschartres and her son Maurice, then a lad of fifteen, contrived by night to obtain access to the room, and removed all the papers likely to compromise her very seriously. She was, however, sent as a prisoner to the Couvent des Anglaises, and her son was debarred from communicating with her and forced to reside

outside the limits of Paris. In August 1794 she was released, and retired to Nohant, a country-seat in Berry which she had purchased a short time before she was imprisoned.

Her son had from boyhood a strong desire for a military life; but Madame Dupin felt a natural reluctance to her only child embracing a career so full of danger. When, however, he was twenty years of age, the Directory, having decided on an energetic prosecution of the war with Austria and her allies, called out a levy of 200,000 men; and Maurice thus found an opportunity of serving without his mother being able to object. He joined the army on the Rhine; and in the next year passed into Switzerland, and crossed the St. Bernard under Napoleon. He was present at the battle of Marengo, and saw a great portion of the famous Italian campaign, acting as aide-de-camp to General Dupont. When peace was declared, he returned to Paris, and remained there until 1804, when he was summoned to Boulogne to join the expeditionary force intended for the invasion of England. During his long absences from home he wrote frequently to his mother; and his letters, being preserved with maternal fondness, have come into the possession of Madame Dudevant, who has thought proper to give them to the world. They are printed in full, and make up nearly four volumes of the work. "Character,' says Madame Dudevant, "is in a great measure hereditary; if, therefore, my readers wish to know what my character is, they should first study my father's character; and they cannot do this properly unless they peruse several hundred of his letters." If biographers generally adopt this theory of their art, and consider themselves bound or entitled to collect together all the writings and traditions of the ancestors of the person whose life they are narrating, a hundred volumes would soon be considered a very moderate size for this kind of book. Fortunately, the maternal ancestors of Madame Dudevant did not know how to write, and we are therefore saved the psychological study of reading their letters; and her paternal line is so soon lost in a chaos of illegitimacy, that family records connected with its history were not very likely to have been preserved. Otherwise, there is no saying how far this great triumph of book-making might not have extended:

When Maurice was in Italy, he fell in with a lady who made a great impression on his heart. She was at that time living under the protection of a general; but the young aide-de-camp ventured to fall in love with her, and she very disinterestedly returned his passion. He wrote frankly to his mother, and gave her a full account of the progress of the intrigue. Perhaps nothing in the whole of this biography seems more strange to