These modest volumes have thus many claims upon the interest of the reader. They reveal to us a life with which only a limited number of people out of France can be acquainted-a life full of the most curious and piquant contrasts, and which, perhaps, is already fading out of the contemporary phases of existence, society in France having passed through more fundamental changes than in any other country in Europe. They bring back to our knowledge one of the finest varieties of the race, more different, perhaps, than any we find among ourselves from the common strain, yet so fully revealed that we become more intimately acquainted with it than we are, it may almost be said, with many of our nearest friends. Coming from the very fine fleur of that French society at a period more unlike the present than in our steadier order we can well understand, profoundly pious, brilliantly mondaine, at home in half the Courts of Europe and in all the convents, with all the wit and logic of France in her talk, and the mystic worship of a devout Catholic in her heart, Pauline de la Ferronays in herself is more interesting than anything she has produced or anything that could be said about her for words have to follow one line at a time, and she was half a dozen different things at the same moment, flashing like the facets of a diamond from the point of view at which you looked at her. We have had innumerable sketches of French society both from the worldly and from the pious side. But no such separation is necessary in France or, at least, in Catholic France where those common occupations of life which in a certain class consist as much of balls, theatres, and receptions as of more homely employments, are no more shut out than is driving or riding, or any natural exercise. Call nothing common or unclean,' said the angel to St. Peter. But no angel has ever been able to convey this point of view to the pious in England; and it was thus with a surprise which may have frightened some readers, but was very pleasant to others, that we discovered in Mrs. Craven's book the most tender and beautiful devotion, the desire ever present to serve and love God and dedicate life to his service, as the foremost of all purposes, among a group of beautiful young creatures who danced and acted with as much energy as any of their gayest contemporaries, and spent every spare evening at theatre or opera, and were indeed as gay, as fond of amusement, as ready to take a part in everything that promised 'fun' and pleasure as young creatures could be. We all

demurred a little at this, even when we were most charmed with the revelation. It must have seemed to many good young people anxious to be saved from the snares of the world, yet drawn a little by a carnal inclination towards the gaieties and brightness of life, too good to be true. The question is a curious one. At all events, we do not hear in France or in Catholic countries generally of that severance between amusements and religion which was believed in among good people fifty years ago, and which has affected the constitution of so many of us through the medium of training and tradition even in days of larger toleration and a less rigid faith.

The father of Pauline de la Ferronays, afterwards Mrs. Augustus Craven, was a Breton noble, and Mrs. Bishop does not fail to note, according to the fashion of the time, the influence of their Celtic origin upon the minds of the family, conferring at once a higher vivacity and a greater spiritual enthusiasm. We cannot say that these discriminations have ever much interest for us, nor does the Comte de la Ferronays himself, from whom they must have been derived, show any original tendency towards enthusiasm, though he died, like the others, in the odour of sanctity. There is one whimsical evidence of a truly Breton (or Celtic) impatience and irritability, however, in the life of this good man which recalls D'Artagnan rather than the graver spirit of the North. M. de la Ferronays was an émigré, an ardent Royalist, and the bosom friend and aide-de-camp of the Duc de Berri, in whose train he returned to France amid all the glories of the Restoration, and was at once provided for as was fit and proper. But, unfortunately, there arose a quarrel in Court touching some indiscreet act of the Marquise de Monsoreau, who was the mother-in-law of M. de la Ferronays, in which the Prince permitted himself to use certain words which greatly offended his friend. It is to be supposed they were immediately repented of, for the Duc de Berri was so full of condescension as to offer to measure swords with the affronted aide-de-camp. But this suggestion was inadmissible, and the consequence was that La Ferronays instantly removed from his apartments in the Tuileries with his young family, within two hours, we are told, throwing up all his appointments. Such a sacrifice for a mother-in-law is, perhaps, unexampled in history. The dispute was about baby clothes! We could have wished for a more dignified motif. It shows what small matters occupied a Court just snatched from exile and dependence to

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a great fate, for which it was not equal. However, this was but the beginning of better things for the hot-headed Breton. He was sent as ambassador to St. Petersburg, where he remained for eight years. Then he held for a few years the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs in Paris, and finally, at the very end of the Restoration period, received, as he was in indifferent health and seeking recovery in Italy, the appointment of ambassador at Rome, which he resigned a year after, when the Revolution of July threw down the Legitimist party into the lowest depths again.

The younger members of the family thus entered life with the most brilliant environments. Pauline was nineteen when she came back to Paris, to all the fascinations of the brightest of cities, and at the dawn of one of the finest periods of French intellectual history. She was never, we presume, beautiful, but she had fine eyes, perfect manners, à remarkable intelligence brightened and polished even at that early age by contact with the great world, and high political and universal interests-and that gift of conversation which is so much more usual on the other side of the Channel than among ourselves. Mrs. Bishop does not give us any reason, beyond her great affection for her own family, why she did not marry at the usual early age which is habitual among French girls of her rank. But the generation was one which had broken loose in several directions from the ancient French code. And there was a spirit of sentiment abroad with which French fathers and mothers could not cope any more than those of other communities. France has never been addicted to love as we understand the word. There is nowhere, perhaps, so much family affection, and the 'grande passion in its unlawful exhibitions has been worshipped there as it never was anywhere else. Unfortunately, however, it has never, except in exceptional instances, or by rare moments, been considered necessary that the foundations of the family should be laid upon that rock. But the experiences of the emigration, which took away, for a time at least, all those external motives of dot and position which had regulated marriage in the France of the old régime, and the intercourse with England, in which a different motive is at least supposed to be the only basis, had produced wonderful, almost incredible modifications for a time; and true love for that moment was in the ascendant, influencing the young and generous mind as never had been before. The

age itself was full of new genius, new impulse-all, in its beginning at least, elevated and noble. It is hard to see why the period then about to open should be so universally discredited in France. It was in literature one of the greatest eras which she has ever known. It was a time of prosperity and peace, and by far the best government that France has ever enjoyed in her century of revolutions. But national feeling is perverse, and the age of great poets, great romancists, great historians, and not inconsiderable statesmen seems now the age which Frenchmen look back on with the least pleasure. Bourgeois, bless us all!—and what, then, is it now?

The family of the Comte de la Ferronays consisted of seven children; for along with the new régime of love it had also become an understood and permissible thing in the well-regulated French world that large families might be an understanding which still exists, or did at a very recent date, in the select regions of the haute noblesse, a whimsical demonstration of goodness and general superiority which we remember to have had proudly held up to us. Of these Pauline would, perhaps, have been the only remarkable member had not her brother Albert become the hero of one of the most touching and beautiful of love stories. The difference between a world in which the young men of M. Paul Bourget are the heroes, and that which surrounded such noble youths as Albert de la Ferronays and Charles de Montalembert, is incalculable; though, for that matter, the young men of Balzac, who were contemporary, and who were worth much more intellectually, were quite as unlike--a consoling reflection, as showing that the actual was far more worthy, true-hearted, delicate, and generous in mind and fancy than the fictitious. Young Montalembert had already embarked in that visionary path of politics which still hoped to connect and even identify national freedom with entire subjection to the Church-an inspiration which deeply affected the young La Ferronays too, though delicate health kept him back from all public work, and his poetic nature soon found the absorbing influence of a first love more potent than all the attractions of the world. These young friends, however, wrote to each other, upon friendship, and love, and religion, letters such as it passes the possibilities, even of fiction, to imagine as written by one young Englishman to another: but so genuine in their youthful expansion, and so lofty in tone and purpose, that we doubt whether the manly and muscular notes which one

dear old fellow might fling to another in our own day could ever be so truly individual, much less those college compositions on the subjects of literature and thought' with which we are equally familiar. The thoughts, and especially the religious thoughts, of such correspondents among ourselves are apt to become either purely abstract or painfully and consciously original at the cost of character and nature. English piety is much the same in the young man as in the old woman; it expresses itself in the way which has been appropriate to the subject for generations; though in everything else the modes of speech have changed, religious correspondence is very much like a long and diffusive paraphrase of the hundred and nineteenth Psalm, without a trace of the impetuosity of David or the poetry of Asaph. But it is not so in the letters of the Frenchmen, which, whether highly intellectual or not, are always instinct with an individual touch, which probably has something to do with the peculiarity we have already remarked, the junction of genuine human life, in all the indulgences which are honest and blameless, with the most highly stimulated life of the soul.

Besides Pauline and Albert, there were two sons-the eldest, Charles, unknown to fame, and the youngest, Fernand, a kind and merry boy, passing through the little drama of domestic life with cheerful steps; and the two sisters, Eugénie and Olga, both with the same predestination on them of early death. It is in the early part of the year 1832, after the ambassador's family had fallen back into a lowlier state, but with undiminished gaiety, popularity, and happiness, that we first see the group of young men in Rome, full of sentiment, art, and romantic politics: M. Rio, the well-known author of L'Art Chrétien,' their guide, philosopher, and friend: Montalembert, the young sub-editor of the 'Avenir,' who had come with his leaders and friends La Mennais and Lacordaire to receive. the decision of the Pope upon that newspaper: and Albert, the sympathiser, disciple, and gentle critic, ripe for any influence which might take possession of his young life. Mrs. Bishop, in going over the story, expresses herself with curious confidence. It has been said,' she tells us, 'that 'two fragments of literature will never cease to be read, the 'prophecies of Isaiah and the "Avenir." The conjunction is scarcely respectful to the elder and greater writer, and we fear, indeed, that even in France there must be many more people who never heard the name of the 'Avenir' than

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