even Mr. Trollope, it seems a serious matter that an English-speaking man should say "I guess " instead of "I expect," or should pronounce "do" "du," or should wear white kid gloves in the day-time, or should commit any other of the solecisms whose commission in England would argue a certain want of knowledge of the habits of genteel society. To a Frenchman these sort of criticisms, with which the works of English tourists are filled, never suggest themselves. His very ignorance of English habits of thought and society preserve him from the fatal error of attaching undue importance to incidental features in American life which have nothing to do with its real essence and character.

M. Laugel is in many respects a very favourable specimen of a French tourist. Connected, we believe, with America by family relations, and intimately acquainted with our English language, and life, and literature, he united to a very great extent the opposite advantages of a French and an English observer. Having resided for some time in America in the closing year of the war, he has published a series of recollections of his Transatlantic experiences, which are well worth the study of anybody who wishes to understand the real aspect of that great country. Like most educated French Liberals, M. Laugel was throughout the war a strong supporter of the Northern cause. Several of the chapters of his book were published in the Revue des Deux Mondes at different periods during the last three years, and to re-read these now is to an Englishman curious enough. At the very time when our own public writers ridiculed and laughed at the notion that the North could possibly defeat the South, or that the Union could ever be restored, this French essayist treated the triumph of the Federals, the restoration of the Union, the present out-turn in fact of the war, as a matter of certainty; and this not because he had any superior channel of information, not because he was an impassioned partisan, but because he was cool enough to look facts in the face, and because, we are afraid we must add, he had more faith in freedom than we showed ourselves. With the clear, incisive logic of a French intellect, he saw at once that slavery was the real cause of the war, and perceiving this, he found no difficulty in understanding the nature of the struggle. "It cannot," he says, "be fairly asserted that the crisis we have just witnessed was the natural result of the application of those democratic ideas which triumphed on the American conti

nent towards the close of the last century. It may be asserted confidently that the war would never have broken out if class | rivileges, under their most unjust and cruel form, had not been surreptitiously introduced into the laws and society of the Union, into the laws by the constitutional protection afforded to slavery, — into society by that prejudice of race which is so terrible an obstacle to the emancipation of the blacks..... What can you say of a social system where, in the midst of the most absolute equality, there existed a privileged class, founded neither on merit, nor on education, nor on distinguished services, nor even on wealth, but only on a certain description of property, that in human beings? This fatal antagonism of slavery and freedom is the key to all the political and social history of the United States."

M. Laugel was in America during the Presidential election, and his account of the fundamental questions at issue between Mr. Lincoln and McClellan is the clearest we have yet seen. He utterly denies the assertion so commonly made at the time in England, that the Democratic party was in favour of making peace with the South. The only difference in his opinion between the two parties was that while the Democrats proposed to restore the Union by guaranteeing the South the possession of their "peculiar institutions," the Republicans proposed to restore the Union and abolish slavery. Of all the many estimates of Abraham Lincoln's character, M. Laugel's seems to us the most philosophical we have met with. No doubt the portrait given of him in these pages is in some degree an exaggerated one. The humour of the man, the honesty, the ignorance, the shrewd mother-wit; the mental hesitation till the final conclusion was arrived at, and the dogged courage with which that resolution was adhered to; the mixture of fanaticism with a kindly cynicism, were all too characteristic of our strange Anglo-Saxon nature for any one not belonging to our race to understand thoroughly. One feature, however, of Mr. Lincoln's character, the influence which his life in the West had produced upon him, is brought out by M. Laugel with great power and acuteness. happened," he says with truth, "that the one dominant and almost only passion of Abraham Lincoln's nature was the passion of the nation. I ought perhaps not to use the word passion to express a resolute, calm, inflexible conviction, a sort of innate and inborn faith in the destiny of the American people. In no part of the Union has the

"It so

national sentiment entered so deeply into the souls of Americans as amidst the populations which live beyond the Alleghanies. The inhabitant of Massachusetts may well be proud of the history of his little State. Most of the sea-board States have traditions and memories of their own, but Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois have as yet no history. The citizen of these vast territories, which he feels are called to such high destinies, is above all an American; he is, he means to remain, the citizen of a great country; he is determined to measure the greatness of his country by the magnitude of the States he inhabits, and his patriotism knows literally no bounds."

Of the feeling thus depicted Mr. Lincoln was undoubtedly a worthy representative, and no small portion of his strength was due to the fact that he knew and sympathised with the depth of the passion for the Union which prevails in the West. In the course of years Western men may come to have the same feelings towards their own States as are entertained by the citizens of Massachusetts or Maryland; but in the West the States as yet exist simply as geographical expressions. Even the most ardent patriot cannot be enthusiastic about the allotment of prairie land out of which his State has been formed within the memory of men still young, and therefore if the Western settler has any patriotism in him it is given undivided to the Union.

The reader who wants to learn how Yankees gobble down their food, or neglect the use of spittoons, or liquor up at bars, had better not turn to M. Laugel's pages. Strange to say, he omits almost all mention of these and similar topics, which form the staple of ordinary Anglo-American books of travel. But those who wish for a great deal of very valuable information about the Western States, told very pleasantly, cannot do better than read the record of M. Laugel's travels. The grotesque side of Ame.ican men and manners and cities has been described so often that it is a change to meet with a writer who tries to understand and explain their real character. Here, for instance, is a remark on the monster hotels of the West which throws a new light on these institutions:

ignores or despises shades, and degrees, and classifications; in the middle of so many equals a man feels himself in truth alone. Everybody has his home, where he shuts himself up with his wife and children; but at his hotel the American sees new faces, he hears other things talked about besides his own business; he learns to love order, cleanliness, luxury, large and spacious rooms; he forms his manners on those of the strangers he meets with there; he watches the movements, listens to the smallest words, of the celebrated personages, generals, statesmen, orators, or writers, whom chance has placed beside him for the day. Amidst this continual flood of new coupers, amongst so many strange faces, he learns the greatness of his country more fully than by studying an atlas. If he cannot visit every State, every State in turn comes to visit him. His horizon extends itself, and from the centre of his vast continent he turns his gaze to the shores of the Atlantic, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the valleys of California. The hotel is in fact an epitome of the Union."

The theory thus exposed may be true or not, but at any rate it seems to us better worth studying than an account of how many times the traveller had to ring before he could get buttered toast for breakfast, or of how many dishes the lady seated next him at dinner composed her repast. We have had enough, and more than enough, of comic American tourists, and we are glad to find one in M. Laugel who is serious without being dull.

From the Spectator.

man's lot in the Great French Revolution,"

*Citoyenne Jacqueline; a Woman's Lot in the Great French Revolution. By Sarah Tytler. 3 vols. London: Strahan,

you will prove a better chevalier than the Marquis to conduct her to England, and thus prevent hazard and ennui. She may marry you. Ah! well, I forgive you, my cousin. Every man must have care for himself, and the very Chapter of the Knights of Malta is dissolved. I forgive you for everything but being actually light-headed for this Petronille's smile and fayour. Chut! I hear the creaking of the joints of the young woman's mind. But men have thick heads and dull brains. They cannot always tell the pewter from the silver, or see that peacocks are not birds of paradise. They have a shade of vulgarity themselves. We are oth

erwise."

There seems to us real genius in this passage. The aristocracy of self-reliant sereniity looking down on the glitter of mere clever effort, and saying to itself, with French vivacity, "Chut! I hear the creaking of the joints of the young woman's mind!" is a touch worthy of any novelist however great. But if Miss Tytler is thoroughly fair to the greater qualities even of the effete aristocracy wiped out by the Revolution, she is more than fair to the qualities of the class which superseded, and deserved to supersede, them in the rural districts. In the innkeeper of Faye and her son, La Sarte and Michel, we have a fine picture of the noblest qualities which are needed to form the nucleus of a healthy and simple society, without any sort of idealism or Arcadian extravagance. La Sarte, with all her depth of faith and pride of simplicity, is no angel, and cannot easily bear to renounce the influence she has exercised as a wealthy innkeeper in a poor village, nor can she bend to offer voluntarily any sympathy to the Demoiselle de Faye in the sacrifices which the latter takes upon herself when she enters a sphere beneath her own, and becomes her daughter-in-law. The picture of La Sarte ignoring all the confusion which her unpractised and unhappy daughter-in-law introduces into the village inn by her ignorance and negligence, rather than volunteer her help and sympathy, much as she loves to counsel and reprove those who spontaneously come to her for advice, is as well conceived as is her proud injunction to her favourite son, the Girondist deputy for Faye, to put a stop to the bloodshed of the Convention, when he and his party had in fact fallen from power and were just about to suffer for their comparative moderation. The sketch, slight though it be, of the intrinsic nobility and consequent serenity in these plebeians of the Sarte family, of the far deeper root which this moral nobility has in them than any which the hereditary rank

of Monsieur and Madame de Faye could strike into the thin soil of the old aristocratic ideas, combined as it is with a very graphic picture of the peculiar, and so to say frosted, charm, which a long hereditary serenity and the comparatively artificial sentiment of noblesse oblige' give to the manners of Monsieur and Madame, is subtle and very effective. Nor is the sketch of the kindly bourgeois family at Paris, the rich mercer Durand and his people, so far inferior in true nobility even to the statelier peasantry owing to a certain want of fixity of status and simplicity of position, less striking. The pompous and good-natured father, with his pompous republican ferocity, his shopkeeper's thrift, shopkeeper's vanity, and personal kindliness; the pretty daughter, Felicité, who is not exactly a flirt, but so much dislikes to give pain that she cannot throw off either of two men who love her, and does her best to satisfy both; the neglected and eccentric little romp Olympe, with her girlish passion for her sister's lover and the diablerie which great talents and high spirits kept down by repressive neglect is almost sure to inspire in young French girls, are all outlined with a masterly hand.

All these sketches are fine, and not less so are the general and still slighter sketches of revolutionary life in the provinces and in Paris. The various village characters of the hamlet of Faye are especially happy, and even to the worst of all, the village butcher Sylvain, with his deep melancholy eyes and insatiable thirst for the bloodiest gratifications of revolutionary ferocity, the author does not deny that touch of human nature which renders him conceivable as a man as well as a demon. We must give one specimen of Miss Tytler's village conversations. The Revolution is at its darkest, and the hamlet of Faye, its church gutted and closed, worship and mass forbidden, and tenth days substituted for the Sunday, does not find itself happier for the reign of Reason:

"Next day an old woman, with her distaff in the bosom of her gown, went along spinning, and driving her red cow before her, from the banks of the Mousse, where, by dint of great assiduity, it had managed to get a few wisps or blades. She looked up, and began to wag her head gravely, as she approached the churchyard gate. It was closed, but clearly not for pulled up and broken into fragments, like the preservation of property. The crosses were woodwork of the little church close by, and neither white ribands nor immortelles rested on the grave of virgin or patriarch. Over the gate was painted, in big, staring, white letters,

the