These loose notes of Rousseau afford a curious insight into his taste in composition. You find him perpetually retrenching epithets-reducing his thoughts to their simplest expression-giving words a peculiar energy by the new application of their original meaning-going back to the naïveté of old language; and, in the artificial process of simplicity, carefully effacing the trace of each laborious footstep as he advanced; each idea, each image, coming out at last, as if cast entire at a single throw, original, energetic, and clear. Although Mr. M had promised to Rousseau that he would publish his Confessions as they were, yet he took upon himself to suppress a passage explaining certain circumstances of his abjurations at Anneci, affording a curious but frightfully disgusting picture of monkish manners at the time. It is a pity that Mr. M- did not break his word in regard to some few more passages of that most admirable and most vile of all the productions of genius. MADAME DE STAËL (1766-1817). I had seen Madame de Staël a child; and I saw her again on her death-bed. The intermediate years were spent in another hemisphere, as far as possible from the scenes in which she lived. Mixing again, not many months since, with a world in which I am a stranger, and feel that I must remain so, I just saw this celebrated woman, and heard, as it were, her last words, as I had read her works before, uninfluenced by any local bias. Perhaps the impressions of a man thus dropped from another world into this, may be deemed something like those of posterity. Madame de Staël lived for conversation: she was not happy out of a large circle, and a French circle, where she could be heard in her own language to the best advantage. Her extravagant admiration of the society of Paris was neither more nor less than genuine admiration of herself. It was the best mirror she could get-and that was all. Ambitious of all sorts of notoriety, she would have given the world to have been born noble and a beauty. Yet there was in this excessive vanity so much honesty and frankness, it was so entirely void of affectation and trick, she made so fair and so irresistible an appeal to your own sense of her worth, that what would have been laughable in any one else was almost respectable in her. That ambition of eloquence, so conspicuous in her writings, was much less observable in her conversation; there was more abandon in what she said than in what she wrote; while speaking, the spontaneous inspiration was no labor, but all pleasure. Conscious of extraordinary pow ers, she gave herself up to the present enjoyment of the good things, and the deep things, flowing in a full stream from her own well-stored mind and luxuriant fancy. The inspiration was pleasure, the pleasure was inspiration; and without precisely intending it, she was, every evening of her life, in a circle of company, the very Corinne she had depicted. LOUIS SIMOND. CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S PROTEST [CHARLOTTE BRONTE, one of the best English novelists, was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, in 1816. She was the third daughter of six remarkable children, five girls and a boy. Their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, bestowed on them a careful education, although he made the mis take of sending the three eldest to school where they were harshly treated. When 38 years of age she mar ried her father's curate, the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, and died the following year. Her novels are, "The Professors,” "Shirley,"" Villette," and "Jane Eyre." The last named, (like" David Copperfield," by Dickens), being largely a picture of her own life.] To that class in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry-that parent of crime-an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth, I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths. Conventionality is not morality. Selfrighteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the crown of thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed; they are as distinct as vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow |