limits of the Peninsula, soon pushed the Italian taste off the boards, was compounded from the chivalrous legends of that "renowned, romantic land," and the tales of the extinguished Moors-the Zegris and Abencerrages. The first gave the heroism; the latter the love and the spirit of intrigue. The hero of Cervantes is mad upon the article of chivalry, which formed the exclusive subject of certain tales, that had intoxicated the Duke of Lerma, and others of the Spanish nobility, and which it was the object of that celebrated novel to hold up to ridicule. But the episodes of that performance are of the mixed character; full of heroism, love, and intrigue, and answering, in every respect, to the parentage which we have provided for them. In calling for the political submission of France, Spain also invited a subordination of her taste in matters of literature. During more than the first half of the sixteenth century, and before the Spanish_ascendancy was established, or, rather, was supposed by the French to be established (for, in fact, it never existed) the species of fiction most in vogue in France were those tales of monstrous invention, which it was partly the intention of Rabelais to ridicule. These gave way on the coming in of the Spanish taste; till, at the beginning of the 17th century, we find French poetry, dramas, and romances, all strongly infected with the foreign manner. It was shortly after this period that the first of that class of Romances called heroic, and contemptuously by our own writers French romances, was written by Gomberville-Polexandre. This was followed by the Cléopatre of Calprenéde, in 12 vols. octavo, and by the Illustre Bassa, Le Grand Cyrus, and others of Mdlle. Scudéri. With French perriwigs and plays the restored Stuarts tried to bring French novels into vogue in England, but they never succeeded with the taste of the people; who, though they had cast off the pope and the devil, hated the French, and loved Shakspeare's Italian dramas too mortally, to take kindly either to Parthenissa, or the shorter Oronooko of Aphra Behn. This was the period we alluded to in stating that there was a time when English and French Romance literature were antipodically opposed to each other. Why, or how, they have since become alike we shall not now inquire.

La Harpe, with his usual flippant coxcombry which reminds us so strongly of many of the discursive light writers of the present day, says, that he never could read the Cyrus. This is worse than Rhadamanthus, who, according to Lord Coke, at least heareth after he punisheth. We should have been bold to hint that a writer, who proposed to publish a course of literature, and especially one like the Lycée which is little more than a course of French literature, should be the last person in

the world to indulge in this gaping contempt of a novel which,
for a full century, had a greater celebrity than any romance
published in his language, with the exceptions of Télémaque,
Candide, and Julie. La Harpe ought to have read the whole of
that class of novels. He ought to have known, in spite of the
wit of Moliere and Boileau, that all that large class of French
tragedies, containing love intrigues, from the Cid down to Tan-
crède, the taste for which Voltaire thought of such importance
as to call for incessant reprobation, may be distinctly traced to
the influence of the heroic novels. The long, wiredrawn cou-
versations, the intricate intrigues, the absence of individuality
of character, the metaphysical, unimpassioned discourses upon
love, the exaggerated honor, the chivalrous gallantry, and tumid
courage of the characters of Corneille, are obvious imitations
from the novels; one of the writers of which made his power
over the public taste profoundly felt by that great dramatist.
The same mistakes, as to the manners of different countries and
ages; the attributing of the exaggerated breeding of Louis the
Fourteenth and his courtiers to characters of antiquity; the
making Brutus talk refinedly, and Alcibiades discourse en petit
maître ;
the same error that made Addison make Juba too gen-
teel, and Voltaire throw somewhat of a French manner around
Zaïre and Orosman; these may be all found in Scudéri. Boi-
leau's prescription for forming the novel, will serve quite as well
for constructing the play.

"Gardez donc de donner, ainsi que dans Clélie,
L'air et l'esprit Français à l'antique Italie ;

Et sous des noms Romains faisant votre portrait,
Peindre Caton galant, et Brutus dameret."

The main mistake in these novels, after all, was their length. Clélie consisted of 10 vols. octavo, of nearly 800 pages each; Cléopatre of 12 vols. of the same bulk! These ballots de papier, as a wit has termed them, call for too much patience. Even Richardson, with all his tenderness and beauty, is found, in these degenerate days, too heavy an infliction upon our attention, now that we are habituated to thin, widely-sown, fourduodecimo-volume parcels of fiction, which may be spelt through by the most unskilled wight at his alphabet, in a few hours. But reduce these lengthy performances to a single octavo, as did Madame Lafayette, and they will be read, admired, and called pictures of nature and real passion.

Our school-boy recollections will enable us to recall the same defects in a celebrated romance, the prosaic dullness and inconsistencies of which, with all deference to its admirers, are by no means redeemed by calling it an epic. That there may be

more skill in the management of the episodes, owing, perhaps, to the author having plunged in medias res, according to the established rules for the epopeia, that the story is continuous, that the style is beyond example elegant and simple, and the learning great; these may be all true. But they do not conceal the great faults, which it has in common with the heroic romances. Télémaque is a French gallant, and Calypso and her nymphs a well-bred set of court ladies. All is refined and polite; the dialogues, manners, and sentiments altogether modern, and different from the savage simplicty of the Odyssey, the professed archetype of the tale. The same defects may be charged upon the Cyrus of Ramsay, and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles of Madame Gomez, which had a prodigious reputation long after Boileau had contrived to drive Scudéri from public favor. The long, wiredrawn, metaphysical, and phrase-cutting conversations may be traced, though faintly, in parts of the Julie and Emile of Rousseau, who confessed that his father and himself were accustomed, in his childhood, to spend the night in a diligent perusal of the heroic romances.

If works of fiction be valuable or interesting as representations of manners or peculiar habits, the heroic romances may so far claim title to be read. It is said, that Calprenéde and Mademoiselle Scudéri formed the taste for galanterie by their works. This appears to us to be going somewhat beyond the mark. The idea of the novels was borrowed in principle from the habits that actually existed amongst the upper classes of France; all that their authors did was to inflame such habits, and to induce them to be practised in a more exaggerated form. This has constantly occurred. The fine folk of the days of Elizabeth, both in England and France, spoke Euphuism, a species of affectation which gave so much Latin both to the French and English tongues. Rabelais ridiculed this taste, and justly. Lily wrote the Euphuist, as an enlarged copy of the existing affectation. He did not create, he only confirmed the habit. We will not deny that it must have been wonderfully ludicrous to hear, not only the fine gentlemen, but the grave military men talking galanterie; to see Turenne, reeking from the Palatinate, surveying La carte du pays de tendre, or Condé making jolis vers, or the sage La Rochefoucault declaring to his mistress, Madame de Longueville, in allusion to the war of the Fronde,

"Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,

J'ai fait guerre à mon Roi, je l'aurais fait aux Dieux."

But ludicrous as these habits were, it is highly interesting to possess accurate notions of them, as part of the history of man

ners. A century before this time, in the days of the Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, men were chivalrous. Chivalry was now replaced by gallantry, and gallantry has since been replaced by the modern politeness. In the first period, there was nought but hard knocks, short tales of wonderment, rough manners, and rough verses.

"Si le roi m'avait donné
Paris sa grande ville
Et qu'il me faut quitter
L'amour de ma mie;
Je dirais au roi Henri,

Reprenez votre Paris ;

J'aime mieux ma mie, oh gay!

J'aime mieux ma mie."

In the second, there were fewer blows, (though we believe, if we may place faith in Cardinal de Retz, a duel a week was the allowance of fighting that every decent person reasonably expected,) long romances, soft manners, and softer verses. See Voiture, passim, or take the following from Clélie.

Quand verrai-je ce que j'adore
Eclairer ces aimables lieux ?

Oh! doux momens momens précieux

Ne reviendrez vous point encore?
Hélas! de l'un à l'autre Aurore
A peine ai-je fermé les yeux."

A tender madrigal, in which Mademoiselle Scudéri makes Brutus-Junius Brutus-pour out love to the Roman Lucretia! In the third there was,-but this we must not tell; for, as Retrospective Critics, we must not review things as they are.

We must avow that, maugre our sense of the ridicule of these manners, this semi-deification of the softer sex has some advantages in it, which the Jansenistic code of our present female morals is without. If women be deified and idolized, they, at least, are not deprived of the society of the master sex. The age of Scudérisme was an age of instructed women, sometimes précieuses, but better withal than the insipid beings so often found ranged with that sex now a-days. If the men were ludicrous, the women, at least, took occasion to improve. Nobody will compare the Ninons, the Daciers, and the frequenters of the Hotel de Rambouillet, or their successors, the Tencins, Geofrins, Dudeffands, and Duchâtelets, to the ignorant, vicious creatures who formed English female society in the days of the Spectator and Lady Montagu. It is the charge against all

novels, that they excite false feelings; that they give erroneous views of the human character; that they teach reliance upon chance, or upon improbable events. Happily for the heroic novels, they are, to a considerable extent, less guilty of these faults than nearly all the works of fiction that have been written. There is no feeling, Minerva-press passion; no excitations of green girls or raw boys. Character they represent little of, and the events are so perfectly improbable, as not to hazard the slightest risk of delusion. All they can teach is, the good-breeding of their age, or rather what Madélon calls "Le bel air des choses." Who ever heard of Cyrus being a work of danger? Who ever heard that a perusal of Cléopatre would ruin the female reader, as Julie is calculated to do, according to Jean Jacques himself? For our part, we would rather see our daughters or sisters gaping over the fine things of the former, than weeping away their nights and their nerves over the sad things of the latter, A taste for the former may co-exist with prudence; but a taste for the latter is entirely opposed both to good sense and proper feelings.

We should hardly dare to pronounce upon the standard of romance-composition; but we may venture to hint a few of the greater features with which novels should be marked. They ought to be faithful delineations of existing manners, or of manners that are tolerably well remembered. They ought to contain accurate pictures of character. If they at times be tender, they ought at others to be lively and witty. They ought not to be vulgar, nor to encourage common prejudices or weaknesses. They may, here and there, be sprinkled with delinea tions of other things than men and women, but at distant intervals; and not thick set in every chapter, like certain tales we wot of, in which, when not "babbling o' green fields," the writer does nought but mouth of hills, clouds, cliffs, and such ordinary gear. Mademoiselle Scudéri has, at least, the merit of depicting a certain sort of manners, those of the great in society. It is known that her heroes and heroines are pictures, or, as they were then called, portraits, of people who figured in her time. Je vous avoue que je suis furieusement pour les portraits; je ne vois rien de si galant que cela. But she has not the praise of having painted one single individual character. All her heroes are heroes of the same family; and their qualities are comprehended in a set formula which heralds them to the notice of the reader. All brave, all chaste, all faithful, all unfortunate, all gallant,—Fortisque Gyas, fortisque Cloanthus. So of the women, so of the knaves, so of the fathers and mothers. The following are the rules for making love laid down by the witty Moliere, the observance of which would effectually prevent that dreadful consummation, marriage. Quick marriages, horrible.