of many unfortunate apostles of authority. How can we expect him to love the city of Liberty à outrance? He has the courage of his opinions. On the back of Paris he has pinned a placard: Take care! she bites!' The monster is beautiful, and he catalogues all her charms with exactness, but does not forget the warning, nor fail to bid us drop a tear in memory of the innocents she has slaughtered. The result is the most vivid and singular of handbooks to Paris, one-sided and yet accurate, erudite but uncritical; for our author takes Lamartine and Maxime du Camp without a grain of salt. The two small volumes are a mine of curious information, of quaint, ghastly, or tragic anecdote and adventure. They will delight the traveller, the antiquary, the romantic novelist, and the reader of picturesque history.

We take up vol. i. But a sense of fair play bids us lay down again the chapters which, dealing with the Louvre and Tuileries, must contain a catalogue of terrible revolts and terrible repressions. We open the second part in the hope that, here at least, the Seine may run less red. On the top of the second page we come to an ornamental account of the burning of the Knights Templars; at the foot of it we skip three centuries, and fall on the fatal duel of the minions of Henri Trois; on the fifth page, in the year 1617, the corpse of the Italian minister Concini is dragged along the streets of Paris by an infuriated mob, while some cannibal tears out the infamous heart, roasts it, and eats it, distributing the body in morsels among his comrades. We have entered the seventeenth century, but on p. 12 we return, full of fervour, to the massacre of St. Bartholomew, while on p. 14 we plunge back a hundred years or so to murder the Count of Armagnac; before the page is finished, we find ourselves enveloped in the 'savage and ignorant furies of the Commune in 1871.' Turn the leaf, we witness the hanging of Enguerrand de Marigny, under Louis le Hutin, while p. 19 is dyed with the blood of the Girondins and Marie Antoinette. The horror, blood, tragedy, and treachery of some seven centuries distilled in twenty pages! No wonder there is no place for anything else. But with such liberty of selection, it is easy to dabble in historic gore. We might thus illustrate the processes of English government by the plucking out of little Arthur's eyes, the stifling of the two little princes in the Tower, the drowning of Clarence in the butt of Malmsey wine, the burning of Joan of Arc at Rouen, the massacres of Drogheda, the cutting off of Charles's head, and finish by

blowing the Indian insurgents from the mouths of our cannon after the Mutiny. Every nation has written its chronicles in blood.

When Mr. Hare forgets the cord and hatchet, he has a delightful fund of anecdote. We are pleased to meet again with the dog of Montargis, and to witness his dramatic duel with his master's murderer before the assembled Court of Charles V. We will not vouch for the story of Hémon de la Fosse, a student, converted to paganism by his classical studies, who in 1503 proclaimed the worship of Jupiter in the church of St. Pierre des Boeufs, and was condemned to burn alive for this offence. It is said that, as an expiatory 'procession was passing after this execution, two cows, 'being led to the butcher, knelt before the Sacramentwhence the name of the church.' But we feel grateful to Mr. Hare for including in his handbook the pretty and authentic tale of Molière's widow causing large fires to be lit o' wintry nights upon her husband's grave, in the Cimetière St. Joseph, in the hope that the poor, out of gratitude for the warmth provided, might forget their wrath at an actor's burial in consecrated ground. Poor Armande Béjart! Mr. Hare might have spoiled this pretty story by quoting M. Loquin's audacious theory, according to which Molière was not buried at all-save, indeed, alive; condemned, in fact, by the king to the Iron Mask, as a penance for having married his own daughter by Madeleine Béjart. Here is a mystery of iniquity quite worthy of a picturesque historian. And Mr. Hare has let it alone; he has let the poor warm their hands by Molière's grave, through his widow's piety, and not through her terror of what an exhumation might reveal. We tender our thanks to him for missing this opportunity; but we are surprised to find him omitting other purple patches: it is true his book is already as brilliant as Joseph's coat. Was he weary of his embarras de richesses? Or is it possible that he has not read the recent work of M. Frantz Funck Brentanoenthralling, thrilling supported by what appears a formidable array of documents? In Mr. Hare's account of the execution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, he says nothing of this modern theory, which goes far to prove the secret complicity of the Montespan. He says nothing of the favourite's jealousy of La Vallière; of the love-philtre dropped in the sovereign's potion, which all but rid the world of Louis Quatorze; of the black Mass offered up at midnight on the Montespan's naked body by an unfrocked

priest, turned wizard as a more profitable trade at court. Yet all these details are surely ghastly, vivid, and picturesque enough to tempt his pen. His book is none the worse for a purple patch or two the less. Seriously, what we miss in it rather are familiar references to the outdoor life of the past, such as, in the six volumes of the Ballades of Eustache Deschamps,' he might have had for the asking-in so far, at least, as regards the fourteenth century.

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A weightier reproach is that, in his attention to picturesque detail, Mr. Hare is blind to what the French call general ideas. Paris is the home and birthplace of such ideas, views, theories, and principles. The violent social contortions, of which Mr. Hare loves to show us the pantomime in Dumb Crambo, are efforts to express some such idea, struggles towards a conception of absolute justice in the government of human society. Revolution in France is a recognised agency of progress: a most expensive one, costing much to achieve little; still, after four such great upheavals, the condition of the majority is certainly a hundred per cent. better to-day than it was a century ago. For good or for ill, the idea of a possible millennium is ever present on Gallic soil, it animates the whole nation; every political party has in its baggage the chart of Utopia. This terrible yet, on the whole, beneficial optimism gilds the cruel realities of revolution, enables men to attack with an heroic earnest, to mount to the scaffold with a light triumphant grace, as being sure that their idea survives them, and rounds the whole scene of apparent terror with an aureole invisible to other nations. Mr. Hare writes of revolution as though it were merely massacre writ large. In France this conflict of two theories of life is recognised by both sides as a valuable experiment in the ideal.

So far back in history as the destruction of the Order of the Temple the same law obtains. Behind the executioner stands the statesman, behind the statesman the Utopian, already dreaming of the Rights of Man. He abolishes the iniquitous few to educate the virtuous many. The question of the abolition of the Temple is the ever-recurring question as to whether the State have the right to confiscate the property of certain individuals for the good of the commonwealth-Henry VIII. confiscated the estates of the Church; England confiscated the rights of Jamaica landlords in their slaves; Alexander II. of Russia confiscated those of Russian serf-owners; a few years ago the Houses of Parliament

confiscated the arrears of Irish landlords-in a few years to come, who knows? some Socialist ministry, somewhere, may confiscate the National Debt. The question is always a difficult and thorny one, but in 1307 it was not very different from what it is to-day. The loss of the Holy Land had destroyed the object of the Temple, which had degenerated into a huge Camorra, an unruly secret society, a State within the State- a gang of sanctimonious brigands,' as Mr. and Mrs. Martin quaintly put it. The King of France decided to dissolve a company so abusive, despatched the persons composing it to a better world in the summary and cruel fashion usual in those times, and affected a portion of their property to the really admirable system of popular education for both sexes which is set forth in Renan's scholarly volume on the religious policy of Philippe-le-Bel. The advisers of the king in this matter were such reformers as France has had to bear with more than once. craft, their remorseless cruelty, their unscrupulousness, accompanied a genuinely liberal ideal and a heart-whole devotion to an end beyond themselves. Implacable and sombre as they are, yet are they excellent patriots, and there is an antique force in the voice of these mediæval magistrates when they pronounce the words: Fatherland,' 'Republic,' Tyranny.' The whole French Revolution is in germ in their Utopia. But Mr. Hare sees nothing of this-nothing but flaming stakes, false accusations, and picturesque modern Templars 'dressed in in mourning making a pilgrimage on March 11 to the scene of their 'chieftain's martyrdom.' All this is worthy of note, no doubt. Yet this indifference to systems and ideas, this insistence on the picturesque, show how difficult it is for an Englishman to look into France through a Frenchman's eyes.

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Their

To settle in Paris is to expose oneself to the action of an atmosphere charged with vital fluids. There are a mental nimbleness, an alacrity, a rapidity, about the Parisians which are disconcerting upon early acquaintance. The first sensation is that of certain mineral springs of stimulating properties, to dip into which is to feel oneself covered with minute prickly bubbles of carbonic acid gas. The reaction, however, is pleasant, and produces a feeling of lightness and ease. It is, indeed, extraordinary in how short a space of time an adaptable nature may become Parisian who was ever more so than Henri Heine, Albert Wolff, or Richard Wallace? The Parisian, nearly always, is made, not born.

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In

Of all races, the American is the most sensitive to this peculiar influence. The last three works named at the head of this article (one, indeed, is by an Englishman, but it is written for Americans and from a distinctly American standpoint) suggest that in that difficult question of an entente internationale, America may accomplish a miracle. language one with England, in quality of mind much nearer France, America may interpret our great neighbour to us, and enable us to see her without those spectacles of hereditary prejudice which, unconsciously to ourselves and involuntarily, affect our vision.

Nothing, for instance, can be less different from the Paris of Mr. Hare than the Paris of Mr. and Mrs. Martin. There is, in their two volumes, scarce a page stained with gore. Such were the ways of those times' is the half-expressed reflexion with which they dismiss the details dear to Mr. Hare; and, indeed, rather unfairly we admit, they despatch the night of St. Bartholomew with the brief boutade of Joseph de Maistre: Quelques scélérats firent périr quelques 'scélérats.' What strikes them as important in Paris is its enthusiastic devotion to ideas. They try to show how the city of Abelard became the city of Pascal and then the city of Voltaire. Their chosen heroes are such capable and masterly human beings as Etienne Marcel and Etienne Dolet, as Molière and Madame de Sévigné. To all Americans the stones of Paris are eloquent, and recount the glorious adventures of the human mind in quest of liberty and truth and justice. Without asking from Paris the weight or the wealth, the might or the majesty of London, Berlin, or St. Petersburg, they attribute as rare a value to this Athens of the modern age. If she choose, in her great Exhibition, to include a Palace of Genius, France could write on its centenary record such names as these: Napoleon and his marshals; Ampère, Arago, Pasteur; Auguste Comte, Taine, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, Michelet; Chateaubriand, Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Musset, Balzac, Flaubert; Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Millet, Puvis de Chavannes, Malibran, Rachel-each name, in its own sphere, of the first rank and value. And we admire the Americans who see in this intellectual efflorescence the real Paris.

Eyes and No-Eyes are not the only travellers. All the authors of our four books are singularly fortunate in their power of vision, and Mr. Hare, as we have said, has the instincts of a painter. But sometimes the heart and the brain travel too, instead of comfortably staying at home,