ris," and who are accustomed to the carefully pruned diction of Octave Feuillet, are naturally shocked to stumble upon words belonging to the unprinted vocabulary which exists in every language. The truth is that when this thorough-going realist essays to describe a particular stratum of society, he does not purpose to put you off with his impression, but means to paint it precisely as it is, and let you form impressions for yourself. He insists that if this principle is anything but a pretence, if the truth is really to be shown in its native rawness and squalor, then the author must reproduce without squeamishness or euphuism the idiom of the class and calling he has elected to depict; otherwise we miss the master-key to its intellectual and moral attitude. Of course, those who do not care to study at first hand the factory and the grog-shop need not read "L'Assommoir," but they should not go the length of supposing that the same language is employed to photograph very different phases of society. When, for example, the author sketches the home circle of the Tuileries or the Ministerial vicissitudes of the second empire, we can assure the reader that M. Zola's style is not unequal to the occasion, although his pen is not by any means that of a courtier. In a word, Zola's novels are like the world. If your ears cannot bear the coarse and brutal phrase by which vulgar folk are wont to drive an idea home, you must pick your company. There will be scope enough for dainty discrimination in these twenty volumes. There is something almost colossal in the proportions of Zola's undertaking, yet it is already wellnigh completed. He purposes, as we have said, to leave behind him a complete panorama of French civilization under the social and political conditions of the second empire. In "La Fortune de Rougon" he has unfolded the circumstances of provincial life and the characteristic features of the mercantile calling in the petty commerce of a rural town. "La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret" is a study of the Church, and especially of the privations, compensations, experiences, and temptations incident to the clerical vocation. In "Le Ventre de Paris" the author studies the method of provisioning Paris, while in "L'Assommoir" he depicts the burdens, blunders, vices, and the redeeming virtues, the shabby, the revolting, and the honorable sides of a workman's life in the Faubourg St. Antoine. In "Son Excellence Eugène Rougon," we have a portrait of Eugène Rouher, the famous ex-Minister of the empire, so curiously minute in its biographical details that almost every incident and personage in its pages can be identified. In another number of the series, "Un Page d'Amour". which by the way is accessible in an English version under the name of “A Love Episode"-Zola opens to us those minor professional circles of the Parisian community which embrace the households of notaries, of physicians in moderate practice, of Government employees below the grade of heads of bureaus, in fact all that stratum of society which in England would be ranked just below the top of the lower middle class. In succeeding novels the army, journalism, the magistracy will by turns occupy the field of his camera. Zola contemplates also a volume on the Commune, that is to say, on the artisan in his political aspect. Whatever may be thought of the fundamental principles of realism in art and literature-a discussion into which we will not just now enter-it is manifest that Zola's immense accumulations will prove of singular value to the future student of France under the social conditions of our day. It is probable that hereafter the young bachelor of arts, returning from his sojourn in the Quartier Latin, and pressed to account for his wide knowledge of Paris-instead of replying like his fathers, "I have read Balzac, and that suffices"-will point to "Les Rougon-Macquart" as the exhaustless treasurehouse of vicarious observation. It may be thought that the theories of realism received a sufficiently crude embodiment in "L'Assommoir" and "Le Ventre de Paris," but the scope of those works at least embraced something besides sheer animalism. They purported to be exhaustive transcripts of the life of workshop and market, and, accordingly, types of industry, sobriety, and kindliness were interspersed, as we see them every day, amid illustrations of sloth, viciousness, and shame. They attested, too, such a profound comprehension of the mechanism of society in the particular strata portrayed, of the rude necessities and coarse devices, of the promptings, pressures, contagions amid which the tinge and fibre of individual character is acquired, that our respect for the observer modified our judgment of the artist. The student of social science seemed so signally to obscure the novelist that we were scarcely more disposed to quarrel with a raw phrase, or an offensive fact, than we should be to insist on a surgeon's performing vivisection in immaculate kid gloves. Yet, even in those cases, the suspicion must not seldom have crossed us that this unshrinking, all-embracing scrutiny of human life belonged to the methods of science, rather than the processes of art; that the uncompromising purpose of telling the whole truth, in the most literal and unvarnished words, would preclude the exercise of the artistic faculty in the selection, disposition, and accentuation of materials. In proportion as the inquirer's purpose should be fully carried out, as his eye should be keen, his hand firm, and his tongue fearless, his work, it was suggested, must inevitably pass out of the category of artistic composition, and be classified with the raw material of history. Unassorted, unwinnowed, and unchastened with any reference to æsthetic emphasis and significance, the record of his observations would be, at best, a photograph and not a picture, a diary and not a novel, a chapter of biography, a cross-section of real life. Heretofore, however, none of the champions of realism, neither Flaubert, nor the brothers Goncourt, nor Zola himself, had been perfectly unswerving and unscrupulous in the application of their theory. Zola, for instance, in "La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret," actually reverted, for a moment, to the idyl and the parable. His latest work, "Nana," on the other hand, is the most extravagant result of the doctrine that anything which is true may be printed, and that nothing human, though it reek with the foulness of a worse than bestial humanity, is foreign to the purpose of the student of manners and the painter of society. To purge the passions, we are told on high authority, is the aim of tragedy; but Aristotle is far from affirming that the methods of the dramatist and those of the physician should be identical. It is one thing to watch, rapt and awestruck, on the stage of an Athenian theatre those who have sinned in the high places, a Thyestes, a Clytemnestra, caught in the meshes of an irrevocable doom. It is another thing to track the fetid course of a lewd woman from pinchbeck magnificence to hopeless squalor, from the lazaretto to the morgue. For his part, however, Zola cares but little about the abstract conceptions of beauty and sublimity, and he snaps his fingers at æsthetic canons, no matter how potent the names which may have sanctioned them. He is a Jacobin in politics, an iconoclast in literature; he prefers the dissecting-room to the studio, and is perfectly willing to be refused the title of artist, provided you will concede to him the useful name of physiologist. Certainly the works of Zola will be accounted valuable material by the future student of nineteenth century society. What the writings of Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter are for the resolute inquirer into Roman civilization, that Zola's "Nana" may be found when another generation shall seek to comprehend the social decomposition and political catastrophe of France under the second empire. Edward Rowland Sill. BORN in Windsor, Conn., 1841. DIED in Cleveland, Ohio, 1887. THE LOVER'S SONG. [Venus of Milo, and Other Poems. Privately Printed. 1883.—Poems. By Edward Rowland Sill. 1888.] LEND me thy fillet, Love! I would no longer see: Then might I pass her sunny face, Ah! Banished so from stars and sun- If only she might dream me good Lend her thy fillet, Love! TH OPPORTUNITY. HIS I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream :— And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel- Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead, THE THE FOOL'S PRAYER. HE royal feast was done; the King care, And to his jester cried: "Sir Fool, The jester doffed his cap and bells, And stood the mocking court before; They could not see the bitter smile Behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head, and bent his knee "No pity, Lord, could change the heart The rod must heal the sin: but Lord, "Tis not by guilt the onward sweep Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay; 'Tis by our follies that so long We hold the earth from heaven away. "These clumsy feet, still in the mire, Among the heart-strings of a friend. Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung! The word we had not sense to say Who knows how grandly it had rung ! "Our faults no tenderness should ask, The chastening stripes must cleanse them all; But for our blunders-oh, in shame. "Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; That did his will; but Thou, O Lord, The room was hushed; in silence rose The King, and sought his gardens cool, And walked apart, and murmured low, "Be merciful to me, a fool!" VOL. X.-7 I EVE'S DAUGHTER. WAITED in the little sunny room: The cool breeze waved the window-lace, at play, And out upon the bay I watched the wheeling sea-birds go and come. "Such an old friend,-she would not make me stay All a man's hoarded prudence at a blow: Gold hair, that streamed away As round some nymph a sunlit fountain's flow. "She would not make me wait!"-but well I know IT George Makepeace Towle. BORN in Washington, D. C., 1841. GLADSTONE SPEAKING. [Certain Men of Mark. 1880.] T was in the lobby of the Commons that, some fifteen years ago, I first saw Mr. Gladstone. He was then in the full prime of life, being about fifty-five years of age. He had already won a degree of political renown only less than the highest. At that time he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Palmerston's cabinet; and, next to Lord Palmerston, was the most distinguished member of the popular House. He had been a member of Parlia ment thirty-three years; and his career there, at least as far as reputation was concerned, had been a triumphal progress, ever and steadily advancing. No one doubted that at some day not far distant Mr. Gladstone would be summoned to assume the post of Prime Minister. A glance sufficed to recognize him. His photographs peered at the passerby from every book-store and print-shop in London; and no one could have seen them without taking note of the very remarkable, expressive, intense features they discovered. But there was something about Mr. Gladstone as he stood there, gravely talking with two gentlemen who listened to him with every outward sign of respect, which the photographs had not disclosed. There was a certain plainness, almost rusticity, of dress and external appearance; a thick-set, farmer-like body, far from graceful; a certain negligence. of attire and toilet and manner, and simple gravity of bearing, which one had |