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each other farewell before we get into the street where everybody can hear us . " " Yes , Cyprien , " replied I , " let us bid each other good-bye here , and when you have taken me back to the door of my house , the place from whence you fetched me , you shall not even come in ; you shall go away again without even whispering my name , so that evil tongues may have nothing to say against us . « * Then , sir , he put his two arms on the neck of his mule , like a man during prayer-time rests his elbows on his pew in church ; turned his head towards me , and I
put my face near his , and he said , " Farewell , then , Miss Genevieve ! " " Farewell then , M . Cyprien ! " I answered . Then he sighed very deeply , and I sighed too ; and he said again , " Good bye , Miss Genevieve , " and I repeated , " Good bye , M . Cyprien ! " and so went on for at least fifty times each : " Adieu , Gene-¦ vieve ! " " Adieu , Cyprien ! " and sighed as many times without saying anything more . At last he raised his
left arm and put it round my waist , and drew me towards him , and kissed me , and pressed me to his heart ; and all was over . He took the mule by the bridle , walked on without turning back once and without speaking till we got to my door , lifted me off the mule , gave me back my key , then turned the head of the mule homewards , and set off without stopping to look back . But I saw that he was weeping , and I sat down for a moment all alone on the stone bench in the shade near my door , to cry also silently . ' "
On arriving at her home Genevieve is interrogated by her sister Josette , and is obliged to tell her she is going to be married . Josette , like a wilful , spoiled child , begins to cry and sob , and will not hear of the marriage . A " scene " takes place between them , at the close of which Genevieve , to pacify her sister , vows she will not marry Cyprien . And this vow she keeps ! The marriage is broken off . She remains with her sister . Now . what does the reader think of
such highflown sentiment and circulating library modes of action by way of a literature for the People , which , interdicting all " imagination , " professes only to copy the " reality" ? What answer would the broad direct good sense of the People make to such a statement ? The answer would be : Genevieve is a simpleton to suffer her life to be controlled thus by the caprice of a child , and she has no right to sacrifice the happiness of her lover on such a pretext . Genevieve is not heroic , but absurd .
The story continues . Cyprien marries another . Genevieve is unhappy but stoical . Josette blooms into womanhood , and falls in love with a young officer , who was thrown from his horse at their very door ( the old style !) , and who marries her secretly ( an action familiar enough in novels , but not common in villages between young nobles and peasant girls !) , but is forced to quit with his regiment before he can avow it . This romantic young officer is killed in an engagement . Josette very naturally objects to hiding herself from the gaze of her neighbours , and wishes to tell everyone boldly : —
" ' Yes ! I was his wife , and I shall soon be the mother of his child . ' When girls are passionately in love , they consider their love an honour rather than a disgrace . But I said to her : " ' The name and the honour of the family do not belong to you alone ; do you wish to dishonour and destroy me together with yourself ? Do you wish to disgrace the memory of our poor mother , and cast a slur on the reputation of our brother in his regiment ? Do you wish it to be said : «« See how well her mother brought her up ! and how well her sister took care of her ! there goes the brother of the two bad girls of Voiron ! " ' * ' * She understood this reasoning , sir , and agreed to what I said , and promised all I wished . '"
If Josetto understood this reasoning she had greater intelligence than we can boast of , for to our apprehensions the whole thing is preposterous , so untrue that it would shock us even in a high-flown Minerva press novel . In the first place , admitting that Josette could not convince her neighbours that she really ¦ was married , illegitimate children are not such rare phenomena in villages as to dishonour the whole aside
family in which they appear ; but setting that , does not the reader feel that Josette and Genevieve , both respected as they were , would have been objects of generous sympathy , and that the fact of marriage might have been stated with certainty of credence ? To have made the incident suitable to his purposes , he should have said nothing about marriage , but allowed the young officer to seduce Josette in the approved manner .
ment such as this , rather than with fairy tales , poems , and unhappy princesses , they must be formed of different material from other Peoples . But we can pursue the subject no farther . To criticize the truth of Lamartine ' s works is an idle task ; we have indicated enough to direct the reader ' s attention to the point we wished , and can therefore safely recommend him to read the story just as he wouid read any of
the thousand and one stories fabricated for the amusement of the wearied or unoccupied . It will amuse a listless hour ; but it will not withstand serious criticism . As " tasters" for the public we recommend it , knowing the public is not exacting ; as critics , " guided by severer rules , we pronounce it valueless in respect of its substance , though very felicitous in some of its details of execution .
The child is born ; to save the family honour Genovieve persuades her sister to send it to the foundling hospital ; the nurse who takes the child there is arrested , and refusing to name the mother , is imprisoned ; Josette dies ; and Genevieve , again called upon to be heroic , takes the fault upon herself , declares sJte is the mother of the child , and is imprisoned in consequence . Ileally this is the hysterics of honour ! If the French People are expected to sympathize with rhodomontado of senti-
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BOOKS ON OUR TABLE . The English Language . By Robert Gordon Latham , M . D . Third Edition , revised and greatly enlarged . Taylor and Walton . This is a work of solid and careful erudition . Dr . Latham has long heen known as a philologist whose works rival German authorities in the comprehensiveness of their material and the minute accuracy of their research . Without aiming at achieving distinction by brilliant paradoxes or novel views , he is careful to possess himself of all the latest results of European enquiry , and so bring
before his reader what is the actual state of every question . Iu the present edition of his work on the English Language , the reader who is curious in such matters , will find a lucid arrangement combined with great minuteness of detail . The method is partly historical and partly grammatical ( or , as he styles it—logical . ) The first exhibiting the inflections which , have been used ; the second , exhibiting the way in which they ought to be used . To give anything like an analysis of its contents would so transcend our limits , that we must restrict ourselves to an emphatic commendation , leaving the curious reader to make further acquaintance with it in its own pages .
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Light and Darkness . By Mrs . Crowe . H . Colburn . Knight ' s PictorialShakspere . Part II . The Comedy of Errors . C . Knight . Cyclopadia of London . Part I . C . Knig-ht . Cyclopaedia of Industry of All JVations . Part I . C . Knight . Upon Party . By Burke and Lord John Russell . [ Edited by Charles Purton Cooper , Esq . Pickering . Tracts on Christian Socialism . VI . Bell . The Reign of Cant and Humbug , exemplified in tlie career of Jeremy Diddler { late M . P . for Kennington ) , the Gas Philanthropist . Oltice of the Gas Journal .
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MAORIS ADY'S FAREWELL . In the year 1817 , a German poet , a critic of tho highest pretensions , whose appreciation of Shakspere few will doubt when we name him—Ludwig Tieckcame to England , and followed with great interest and an unbiassed judgment the performances of Kemble , Kean , and Miss O'Neill . In one of the tragedies he notices— The Apostate— Macready played the
villain , and Tieck says of him : —" His villain was so admirably represented , so vehement , truthful , and powerful a personation that for the first time since I have been in England I felt myfielf recalled to the best days of German acting . If the young man continues in this style he will go far . " We remember , in a conversation on actors wo had with him in 1839 , his saying that Macready pleased him better than Kemblc or Kean . Wo confess the comparison with
Kean seems to us unfortunate : in general culture , careful study , picturesqueness of costume , and what one may call the domesticities of tragedy , Macready is as superior to Kean as he is inferior in passion , grandeur , ideality , and the peculiar something named genius . Kean had a lion-like grace , a lion-like intensity which impressed the spectator ineffaceably . When he let himself loose upon the storm of passion , he abandoned himself to it without reserve : whatever he did well he did incomparably . But he did many things ill . His ore had alloy of the basest qualities . He was full of trick , melodiame , and
slovenly indifference to those passages which did not admit of points . Macready , on the contrary , plays parts as wholes—neglects nothing , studies every gesture , and errs on the side of over-elaboration . Every one must admit Macready to be a remarkable actor , and one to whom writers have always entrusted new parts without misgiving . He has been a favourite of the public for many years ; and a sort of sadness falls upon the mind when we think that this is to be his last few weeks of triumph . We shalj miss him when he is gone . Dramatic authors vfi \ miss him greatly . The stage , already so poor in talent * cannot afford to lose him . » On Monday he played Macbeth to an excited and crowded audience ; on Wednesday , Hamlet ; on Thursday , Shylock .
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A brief paragraph must despatch the remaining theatrical news . A . " screaming " farce produced at the Adelphi , called The School for Tigers , shows Wright and Miss Woolgar in two parts admirably suited to them ; Compton is great in Allow Me to Apologise , at the Olympic ; Hudson rattles through My Friend in the Straps and The Irish Diamond , at the Haymarket ; and Keeley and Harley are riotously mirth-pro voking in Sent to the Tower , at the Princess ' s .
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ART AND MANUFACTURE . There is nothing new in the idea of applying the principles of beauty to the formation of useful articles , but it has found new modes of manifestation ; in some instances hardly so much expressing its genuine spirit , as interpreting it in favour of artistic caprice . . Simple enough in itself , it has been so overlaid by a complication of fancies , that some care is necessary in extricating the original idea . Objects of utility have a beauty of their own , which is generally apparent in exact proportion to their practical fitness . Take a carpenter ' s rule ; is it not at once elegant , simple , and sufficient ? Its beauty is that of conciseness , and is as perfect , in its own
inferior degree , as the beauty of the Portland vase . But the two kinds are distinct , and see how an attempt to fuse them has ended in commonplace . An eminent decorative manufacturer has published a reduced copy of the bas-relief group of Neptune and Amphytrite from the Glyptothek at Munich , and adapted it to a foot-rule , which , as a mathematical instrument , is rendered unavailable by the excrescence ; at the same time the beauty of the antique design is injured by an ugly fringe of marks and figures . With equal propriety we might take a wine-cask—not an ungraceful object in itself—and make it the base of a Tuscan column .
A propensity to cumbrous ornament distinguishes all the bad styles of design . The very worst , perhaps , ever known , obtained among us until a comparatively recent period , having originated in France during the Empire . This remarkable epidemic was chiefly manifest in handles . On every available space was screwed a brass handle , generally formed by a knot of snakes , biting each other's throats . A certain walnut-tree cabinet is to us a hideous dream on this very account . Now , we may observe that an
unavoidable projection , for the purpose of a handle , affords the best opportunity of extraneous embellishment , and is often the only excuse for disturbing tho simplicity of useful form . In a handsome dinner , service , manufactured by Messrs . Elkington of Regent-street ( the inventors , also , of the foot-rule abovementioned ) , this legitimate excuse has been turned to happy account . A miniature copy of the celebrated antique Boar in tho Vatican , is here made to serve as tho handle of each cover , and presents tho desirable facility of grasp , while it forms an appropriate
ornament . There is no reason why the influence of art should be unfelt in the poorest home . It is not of familiarizing beauty that we are nfiaid , but of vulgarizing it 5 and it is as easy to vulgarize beauty in applying it to luxurious ends , as by grafting it on some common utensil .
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The Nostrums of Parties . —" And so I began to look on man ( and too many of us , I am afraid , are doing so ) as the creature and puppet of circumstances—of the particular outward system , social or political , in which he happens to find himself . An abominable heresy , no doubt ; but , somehow , it appears to me just the same as Benthamites , and economists , and high-churchmen , too , for that matter , have been preaching for the last twenty years with great applause from their respective parties . One set informs the world that it is to be regenerated by cheap bread , free trade , and that peculiar form of the ' freedom of industry ' which , in plain language , signifies ' the despotism of capital ;' and which , whatever it means , is merely some outward system , circumstance , or * dodge ' about man , and not in
him . Another party ' nostrum is more churches , more schools , more clergymen—excellent things in their waybetter even than cheap bread , or free trade , provided only that they are excellent—that the churches , schools , clergymen , are good ones . But the party of whom I am speaking seem to us workmen to consider the quality quite a second consideration , compared with the quantity . They expect the world to be regenerated , not by becoming more a Church—none would gladlier help them in bringing that about than the Chartists themselves , paradoxical as it may seem—but by being dosed somewhat more with a certain ' Church system , ' circumstance , or dodge . ' For my part , I seem to have learnt that the only thing to regenerate the world is not more of any system , good or bad , but simply more of the Spirit of God . " —Alton Locke .
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Mr . Charles Selby has written a humorous reply to our onslaught upon his piece the Husband of my Heart , but the only point in his letter which concerns the public is the rectification of our error in stating that the piece was a rifaccimento of the Pride of the Market—an error so venial , by the way , that even the Times fell into it . Mr . Selby informs us that the piece was translated from Duchesse et Poissarde , and not from La Bouqueticre du Marche des Innocents We stand corrected . For the rest Mr . Selby has taken our article in its right spirit—that of jocose reproof .
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Nov . J 2 , 1850 . ] © f ) $ aLiaU *?* -763
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Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 2, 1850, page 763, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1857/page/19/
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