Ouvrages de M. About. Paris: Hachette, 1860.
La Nouvelle Carte d'Europe. Paris: Dentu, 1860.
M. ABOUT is one of the cleverest of living Frenchmen. Perhaps, in his own way, he has no rival. No one in this generation has come so near the sprightliness, the worldly shrewdness, and the drollery of Voltaire. There are many passages in his tales which, without giving any painful sense of direct imitation, are almost to be ranked with Candide and L'Ingénu. Like Voltaire, M. About charms us not by direct sallies of witty writing so much as by happy turns of language and a certain well-bred impertinence of style. Like Voltaire, he has the art of treating impossible and fantastic incidents as if they were probable, and of carrying us along with a narrative that we laugh at ourselves for admitting as credible. He has the genius of dramatic construction, which enables Frenchmen alone of all people in the world to make any number of good acting plays out of the most miserable materials. Like Voltaire, too, he is fond of applying his sense and his wit to the questions of the day, and of treating political problems with that suggestive lightness which sometimes seems to open veins of rich and available thought, and sometimes invests the most serious affairs of life with an atmosphere of mockery. Unlike Voltaire, however, he never trades on the public appetite for polished licentiousness, and his books are unsoiled with any thing like coarseness. The day is also past in France when Scripture characters were considered to have principally existed that they might provide food for a neat