really worth cultivating among the rest. Still, curious points of difference, affecting manners or morals, might be selected.

For example, an Englishwoman seldom leaves her house unattended, or without a chaperon, and would be seriously compromised were she to travel much with a man not nearly related to her. In Germany, a woman may undertake a journey, of any length or duration, with a male friend of any age, without compromising herself; that is, if their vocations really call them the same way, and the journey be not undertaken as a blind. The Germans, in short, do not take for granted that opportunity will necessarily create inclination; or that friends will be converted into lovers by sitting together in a carriage during the daytime and occupying apartments in the same hotel at night. In one novel, we find a countess travelling with a handsome young artist: in another, an aged President gives his wife full permission to travel with a young member of his court; and we find, on inquiry, that such occurrences would excite no more comment in actual life than in Madame Hahn-Hahn's pages. The same liberty is enjoyed by women in the United States. In England, however, when a middle-aged nobleman, of grave habits, happens to state, in a letter to a Bishop (a curious confidant for a liaison) that he has been taking a ten days' tour with an accomplished female friend (Lady Davy), his excellent and right reverend editor feels it a duty to bear personal testimony to the purity of their intentions.' It

Letters of the Earl of Dudley to the Bishop of Llandaff, p. 353. Lady Davy was angry with the Bishop for his justification; con

might be made an instructive question, how far the strictness of the English rule indicates a superior state of morals, or the contrary.

The best of Madame Hahn-Hahn's books of Travels are her Reisebriefe,' being Letters to various members of her family (from October 1840, to November 1841), describing a journey across the Provençal country, over the Pyrenees, and through the greater part of Spain. and Portugal. With an enthusiastic love for the fine arts, a marked preference for the romance of history, and a mind crowded with associations, she carries us along lightly and pleasantly enough. We may not have to thank her for much constitutional or statistical information; but we learn the aspects of the cities and the habits of the people; pick up some agreeable reminiscences about Moors and Troubadours; acquire a fresh feeling for Velasquez and Murillo, as well as a fresh relish for Don Quixote and Gil Blas; are made eye-witnesses of auto-da-fés and bull-fights; and find the Alhambra restored for our especial benefit.

'Astralion, an Arabesque,' is a little dramatic poem, in which the dramatis personce are birds, who talk in good rhymed verse on several subjects not connected with ornithology.

Madame Hahn-Hahn visited England, Scotland, and Ireland, in 1846, and made our social institutions, especially those affecting the well-being of the lower classes, her especial object of study. She embodied her

ceiving it to imply that she was incapable of inspiring illicit thoughts or wishes.

observations in a work, which was forwarded in manuscript from Naples to the writer of these pages, upon an understanding that he was to engage a translator and a publisher. Through some unaccountable oversight of the Foreign Office, the MS. never reached him till two years afterwards, by which time Madame HahnHahn had lost all interest in it, and it was consequently returned to her. During the intervening period, a domestic affliction had induced her to join the Roman Catholic (the Alleinseligmachende) Church, and she has ever since devoted herself to religious and philanthropic objects, combining practical utility with earnestness in the promulgation of her faith. All her subsequent works, which are too numerous for even a brief analysis or description, are marked by strong Ultramontane tendencies. They betray no decline of intellectual power.

342

M. DE STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE).

(FROM THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, JANUARY, 1856).

1. Bibliothèque Contemporaine. 2o Série. DE STENDHAL Euvres complètes. Paris: 1854-55.

2. Romans et Nouvelles. Précédés d'une Notice sur De Stendhal, par M. B. COLOMB. 1 vol.

3. Correspondance Inédite. Précédée d'une Introduction. par PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, de l'Académie Française; ornée d'un beau Portrait de Stendhal. 2 vols.

THE literary career of Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonyme of De Stendhal, deserves to be commemorated, if only as a curious illustration of the caprice of criticism; or it may be cited in proof of the occasional readiness of contemporaries to forestall the judgment of posterity, when there is no longer a living and sentient object for their jealousy. His habits were simple, his tastes were of a nature to be easily and cheaply gratified, and his pecuniary wants were consequently of the most modest description. He would have been content, he tells us, to rub on with 4,000 francs a year at Paris: he would have thought himself rich with 6,000; and in an autobiographical sketch he says, 'The only thing I see clearly is, that for twenty years my idéal has been to live at Paris in a fourth

story, writing a drama or a novel.' This ideal was never realised, because the booksellers and theatrical managers would not, or could not, bid high enough for dramas or novels from his pen; and he was eventually compelled to accept the consulship of Civita Vecchia, where the closing period of his life was shortened by the diseases of the climate, as well as embittered by disappointment and ennui.

There occurred, indeed, one striking exception to this general indifference. In the Revue Parisienne' of September 23rd, 1840, appeared a long and carefully written article, entitled an Étude sur H. Beyle,' by Balzac, in which La Chartreuse de Parme' was declared to be a masterpiece, and its author was described as one of the finest observers and most original writers of the age. But although elaborately reasoned out, and largely supported by analysis and quotation, this honourable outburst of enthusiasm was commonly regarded as an extravagance into which Balzac had been hurried by an exaggeration of generosity towards a fancied rival; and Beyle's courteous letter of acknowledgment contains the following sentence, showing how little disposed he was to overestimate his position or his hopes:

This astounding article, such as no writer ever before received from another, I have read, I now venture to own to you, with bursts of laughter. Every time I came to a eulogium a little exalted, and I encountered such at every step, I saw the expression of my friends' faces at reading it.'

Could he awake from the dead and see his friends' faces now, his characteristic smile of irony, rather than