themselves. Their success stimulated a study of the records of the hanged to obtain heroes for "intense" novels, and the romancer emerged from his researches rich in the spoils of the prison and gallows. The result was a general jail delivery into literature of the convicts of centuries. The popular imagination was laden with the exploits of robbers and murderers. It was stimulating the intellect of the people with rum and gin, and it succeeded. The romances were eagerly reprinted here, and eagerly purchased. There was but one thing wanting to complete the evil, and that was a morality which justified rascality, and made it philosophical as well as romantic. This was supplied by France.

The vice of the French mind is its tendency to run into extremes. It abhors a just medium between opposite faults. With regard to religion, it rests in superstition or atheism; in government, it flies from servility to license; in literature, it passes from cold correctness to convulsive deformity. France is almost the only country which could have produced the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the writings of the Encyclopedists. It is either in the repose of despotism or the frenzy of revolution. It adored Louis XIV, and butchered Louis XVI. It is the politest nation in the world, and the nation in which the greatest brutalities have been practised. In literature it once worshipped Corneille and Racine, and called Shakspeare a barbarian. With a revolution in government came a revolution in literature, and it rushed into every extreme of license. The old idols were dashed to pieces to be replaced with monsters. For the cold, sculptural figures, reproduced from classic models, were substituted furies from the mad house, or wretches from the prison. The French romance of rascality has a peculiar recklessness of its own, which the Anglo-Saxon mind is not capable of reaching. In its subjects, the worst excesses

of the English school are exaggerated to hideous caricature, and its representations provoke a kind of shuddering laughter.

The improvement, however, which the French romancers have added to the English school, is in connecting immorality with an ethical system. The leading idea of French romance is, opposition to law and obedience to desire; and its mode of proceeding is to exaggerate the defects of social institutions, in order to obtain plausible arguments for the violation of social duties. Thus it practically sides with every form of criminality, and holds up crime, not to hatred but sympathy. Sometimes it apologises and extenuates, sometimes defends, but in all cases it attempts to confuse our moral perceptions. As it is very inconvenient for some minds to violate conscience, conscience must be smothered in sophistries, compounded of the Satanic and the sentimental. As these sophistries give a degree of respectability to wickedness, and allay the irritation of moral wounds and bruises, they at last convince the mind which framed them, and what originated in hypocrisy ends in faith. The French romancers pretend to see deeper than others into the sources of sin and error; and have discovered the cause of the misery they produce, in legal and moral restraint. They accordingly argue that it is the duty of philanthropists to remove these restraints; and invite all men and women to commence the enterprise, and not be disheartened by the martyrdom it calls for at first; for to assail prejudice naturally draws down obloquy upon the assailant. Great souls must not mind such annoyances. We perceive in this the French tendency to extremes. From the defects or imperfection of social institutions, they argue for their total overthrow. Marriage, for instance, is often a fertile source of misery to husband and wife. If either party chooses to break

the connection, let the act, they would say, not be stigmatized as adultery, but hailed as indicating a mind superior to common prejudices. It is the same with other institutions. Because they are abused, they would dispense with their use. But robbery, adultery, blasphemy, and the like, are disrespectable, and being under the social ban, they occasion other vices. Make them respect

able, and you make them beneficent. The object of these French romances is to exhibit characters who practise all that society calls sin, and yet are better than the society by whom they are denounced. This is the perfection of sentimental rascality.

Now this literary compound of English ruffianism, and French ethics, has invaded the United States in large force; and it comprises at present a considerable portion of the literature which the people read. This literature would not be read unless it were attractive, and what is attractive is influential. Its effect upon character can hardly be estimated. Doubtless such matters as cheap literary rascalities may be of small moment to the smooth scholar; but they should be of more importance than any other form of literature, to the patriot and statesman. Good books are the most precious of blessings to a people; bad books are among the worst of curses. The romance of rascality in the imagination, will be followed by the reality of rascality in the conduct. It contains in itself principles of demoralization which will inevitably be felt in action. This country is the only country where every body reads. It is of much importance to know what every body is reading. How much of this reading is ninepenny immorality, ninepenny irreligion, ninepenny stupidity, ninepenny deviltry? It might not be gratifying to the national pride of "the most enlightened people on earth," to answer that question.

STUDY FOR A HEAD.

By J. R. LOWELL.

HEAR him but speak, and you will feel
The shadows of the Portico

Over your tranquil spirit steal,
And modulate all joy and woe
To one subdued, subduing glow.
Above our squabbling business-hours,
Like Phidian Jove's, his beauty lowers;
His nature satirizes ours:

A form and front of Attic grace,
He shames the higgling market-place,
And dwarfs our more mechanic powers.

What throbbing verse can fitly render
That face-so pure, so trembling-tender?
Sensation glimmers through its rest,
It speaks unmanacled by words,

As full of motion as a nest

That palpitates with unfledged birds;
"T is likest to Bethesda's stream,

Forewarned through all its thrilling springs,
White with the angel's coming gleam,
And rippled with his fanning wings.

Hear him unfold his plots and plans,
And larger destinies seem man's;
You conjure from his glowing face
The omen of a fairer race;
With one grand trope he boldly spans
The gulf wherein so many fall
'Twixt possible and actual;
His first swift word, talaria-shod,
Exuberant with conscious God,
Out of the choir of planets blots
The present earth, with all its spots.

Himself unshaken as the sky,

His words, like whirlwinds, spin on high
Systems and creeds pell-mell together;
'T is strange as to a deaf man's eye,
While trees uprooted splinter by,
The dumb turmoil of angry weather;
Less of iconoclast than shaper,
His soul, safe-housed behind the reach
Of the tornado of his speech,
Burns calmly as a glow-worm's taper.

So great in speech; but ah, in act
So overrun with vermin troubles!
The coarse, sharp-cornered, ugly Fact
Of life, collapses all his bubbles.
Had he but lived in Plato's day,
He might, unless my fancy errs,
Have shared that golden voice's sway
O'er barefooted philosophers:

Our nipping climate hardly suits

The ripening of ideal fruits;

His theories vanquish us all summer,

But winter makes him dumb and dumber.
To see him 'mid life's needful things
Is something painfully bewildering:
He seems an angel with clipped wings
Tied to a mortal wife and children,
And by a brother seraph taken
In the act of eating eggs and bacon.

Like a clear fountain, his desire
Exults and leaps toward the light;
In every drop it says, "aspire!"
Striving for more ideal height:
And as the fountain, falling thence,
Crawls baffled through the common gutter,

So, from his speech's eminence,

He shrinks into the present tense,
Unkinged by foolish bread and butter.