La Lorette may not be discovered in one form or another, nor are those the least corrupt where this product of hypercivilization is least visible; but in every country except France, the influence of family, which is the antidote to the Lorette, is victorious over her, and ends by forcing her to be ostensibly what she is in fact, — a mark for contempt and for shame. Not so with society in France. Here, the Lorette reigns and rules, and to her family is sacrificed. Not only do her worshippers voluntarily abdicate their own natural sphere, in order to move habitually in hers; but the women of what is called "the world," of what calls itself "the honest and the proper world," condescend to take the Lorette for their model,

copy her dress, ape her manners, imitate her language, and insanely fancy that by this self-degradation they shall secure to themselves her supremacy. Here was the origin of the Lorette's importance; here was what granted to her letters of naturalization in Parisian society; and to any one who should not take all this into account, the aspect of that society during the last ten or twelve years would be an enigma. Hence dates, too, the relative superiority of the Lorette; for, from the day when duchesses aspired to be mistaken for Lorettes, it became the ambition of the latter to be mistaken for duchesses, and they little by little grew to affect the steady air of acknowledged social powers, and to assume what we would fain denominate a kind of regularity in wrong. Les Lorettes were, as a German critic has observed, "an establishment in the state." Among the materials that constitute the ensemble of the social edifice they counted for as large a part as did family.

Now we maintain, that, judged by the standard of real honor and real virtue, the narrow-minded, selfish, and for ever untruth-telling society, so well reflected by M. Scribe, is not one whit more virtuous or more honorable than that over which reigns la Lorette, but is less scandalous; and when scandal came to be the order of the day in France, the Théatre de Scribe was, as the French express it, "alongside of the truth," it was no longer true.

As we have said, the Lorette reign has lasted some ten or twelve years (beginning about 1844); but its splendor is

already on the wane, and those who within the last two or three years have the most borne witness to its existence have done so by levelling at it the first and most terrible attacks. Going with the stream, Alexander Dumas fils published in 1848 or 1849 his novel called La Dame aux Camellias, the very most complete expression of Lorette literature, and by its immense success he was induced to adapt it under the same title for the stage, where, during a hundred consecutive representations it remained the apology and triumph of Lorettism. Its author was the champion of La Lorette, and Marguerite Gauthier, his heroine, was admitted to share the honors of all those types which for a time command the applause of the public upon the stage. But Alexander Dumas, to his credit be it said, saw farther than his own success; or rather, the still greater success of a piece which was the counterpart of his own pointed out to him what might perhaps soon be the current of social opinion, if it were adroitly seized. Les Filles de Marbre, a keen, undisguised attack upon all the "Camellia-ladies" in the world, revolutionized Paris, and may be said to have been an event. The impetus was given. Young Dumas produced his Diane de Lys, in which the horrors of illicit affection are very aptly portrayed. Emile Angier followed with his Mariage d'Olympe, to which public favor did not so openly attach, precisely because the impure were more punished than condemned; and young Dumas fixed public opinion to self-consistency by what crowned this campaign against les Lorettes, — his famous piece called Le Demi-monde,- than which none ever drew the public more entirely along with it in the bold disdain it expressed for what was "outside the regularities of life and the decencies and respectabilities of society." The moral of the whole was the concluding phrase, the formula of what may be regarded as the protest of society against the disorder it had tolerated too long. A French officer, a man of unblemished character, is about to fall a victim to the wiles of a Lorette, and to give her his hand and his name; but he is saved by a friend, who unmasks her, and consoles the lover's grief over his lost illusion by saying: "Remember, my dear fellow, that an honest woman only is worthy to be the companion, the wife, of an

honest man." To any one who may compare this sentence with all the theories of Victor Hugo, George Sand, and some others, touching the perfection of female virtue as dependent upon having at least once swerved from the path of duty and of right, it will be evident that a great progress has been made. There is no doubt of the fact; it is now "a received thing," as the phrase runs in France, that Lorettism is contrary to good taste, and the Dames aux Camellias totter upon their throne. But it must not be forgotten that the very importance of the attacks made upon them proves in turn the social importance they had acquired, without acknowledging which it would be impossible to arrive at anything like a just appre ciation of the French society of our day.

One of the hardest blows that has been aimed at this "fifth power," as it has sometimes been called, is the treatise written by Messrs. de Goucourt (brothers), entitled La Lorette, published in a miniature form and sold in profusion throughout Paris. This little book it would perhaps be difficult to translate for our side of the Atlantic, but its publication may be regarded as a courageous act, and as a public service rendered on the other side of it. What we mean by a "courageous act" we will explain. The man who openly attacked Lorettism a year or two ago exposed himself to the silence or to the abuse of the greater number of the journals of Paris; for if we except some few of the more respectable or aristocratic of these papers, nowhere had the Lorette such authority as over the feuilleton. This was the centre of the dominion she exercised by camaraderie, and for any writer not standing upon one of those pinnacles of fame where there is impunity for whatever may be advanced, the enmity of the Lorette phalanx was a very serious consideration. Now, as we said, times are modified, and the tendency is in favor of the domestic element. As in the case of the Théatre de Scribe, so here again we say it may be doubtful whether real virtue and morality are as much the gainers by all this as might be supposed; but scandal is the loser, and ostensibly family is triumphant over the Lorette. For those among our countrymen who wish to have an accurate notion of the state of society, morally speaking, in France, from 1813 up to our

times, we would earnestly recommend an attentive perusal of the Théatre de Scribe, followed by that of Alexander Dumas fils, and by the little treatise we mention, from the pen of the brothers De Goucourt. These are not things to be neglected, and such apparently light productions often paint more truly the moral condition of a country, than do huge volumes of statistics or political economy.

There is another branch of literature in France which we propose to examine in our next number, the so-called Litérature de la Bohême, which occupies a not inconspicuous place in the French world of intelligence, but to which our present limits would not allow of our doing justice. This Bohemian literature may not improperly be considered as the history of the "decline" of letters in France, as the literature of the seventeenth century is pre-eminently that of their highest point of glory. Under the first half of the reign of Louis XIV., as under the Restoration and Louis XVIII., we have to watch the dignity of what the Athenians of modern days term with such pride les lettres françaises, and to note the tokens of respect by which great writers are surrounded, and the respect they take care to pay to themselves. For the last five or six and twenty years it is the very reverse that has to be observed, and an entire literature (full of talent, alas! in its way) is there to testify to the moral unworthiness, the social degradation, and the loss of self-esteem of nine tenths of the so-called men of letters in France. As in the case of the Lorettes, so with the Bohemians, there is no means of entirely judging the condition of French literature without taking them into account. They unfortunately represent a very large portion of the national literature at present, and, as we said, so far as mere talent goes, apart from every other qualification, they are often too highly distinguished for it to be possible to pass them over in silence.

Apropos to the flourishing state of letters in France under the Restoration, and to the social dignity of the men of intellect of that period, Lamartine's last Entretien (the tenth number) is as interesting as it is eloquent. Leaving on one side his Indian philosophers, and the subjects with which, for the previous six months, he had somewhat tired his readers, he has

in this last number launched out into a magnificent defence of the men who made illustrious the first years of the present century in France, and gave it a right to be classed as on a level with the age of Louis XIII. and XIV. Starting from the time of the Convention, and passing on to the Empire, to the Restoration, and thence to the Government of July, he pays a tribute of admiration no less just than admirably expressed to a period which, intellectually speaking, will always be one of France's titles to fame in the eyes of the world. Not one of the great names of the age is forgotten, and each is appreciated in a way that proves the author of Jocelyn, when he is animated by a sincere conviction, to be as well gifted in critical qualities as in those of poetic inspiration. M. de Lamartine's tenth Entretien has created a strong sensation, and calls everywhere for the reader's best attention.

ART. X.-1. Die Geschichte der Römer. Von FR. DOR. GERLACH und J. J. BACHOFen. Erster Band. Basel: Bahnmaier's Buchhandlung. (C. Detloff.) 1851. 8vo. pp. 669. 2. Römische Geschichte. Von Dr. A. SCHWEGLER, ausserord. Prof. der Class. Lit. an der Universität Tübingen. Erster Band. Tübingen. 1853. Verlag der H. Laupp'schen Buchhandlung. (Laupp und Siebeck.) 8vo. pp. 808.

3. Geschichte Roms in drei Bänden. Von Dr. Carl PETER, Director des Gymnasiums in Anklam, und Herzoglicher Sachsen-Meiningen'scher Consistorial- und Schul-Rath. Erster Band, die fünf ersten Bücher. Von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gracchen enthaltend. Halle, Waisenhaus Buchhandlung. 1853. 8vo. pp. 616. 4. Römische Geschichte. Von THEODOR MOMMSEN. Band. Bis zur Schlacht von Pydna. Leipzig, Weidmann'sche Buchhandlung. 1854. 8vo. pp. 644.

Erster

ROMAN History has fully shared in the rapid progress made in all branches of classical philology in the past thirty years. In no other branch, indeed, can progress be so clearly seen