dinary success; and most grateful am I for that which has been accorded me. There is something indeed in the nature of a work like the present, which furnishes in itself an excuse for its imperfections. On the one hand, the author is called upon to devote much industry and time to the collection of his materials; and this gives his efforts the effect of preparation and research. On the other hand, he is called upon to throw those materials into form with as much rapidity as possible, and this tarnishes his labours with the defects of

negligence and haste. Oh! reader, who is to be!-did you chance to hear that not long since, a small island suddenly appeared on the coast of Sicily; instantly we planted our flag there, so thank God! it is ours. But it as suddenly disappeared-yes; it is ours--but under the ocean; the sounding sea rolls over it again; and if we had delayed a moment, it would never have been added to our empire, no, never. Such, in some sort, is the shifting scene of life and politics before us, the condition and the fortune of states and of men. We must plant our standard quickly—at the moment-on that fleeting shore;-a minute, and it will be covered by the ever mounting sea, which has already risen over 5000 years.

LIGHT LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

Early species of popular composition-Origin of novels -Chivalric Italian-Heroic Milesian-Later schools -Le Sage Rousseau-Walter Scott Anomalous school displayed in melo-drama-General considerations.

IN some degree I regret that my volumes open with the subject I am now commencing.But this work must be considered as the continuation of one published a year ago; and which, concluding with history and the drama, left me about to enter on the lighter productions of French literature.

Still, such productions are not altogether unworthy of consideration: they have generally been thought to pourtray, more faithfully than any other, the manners of their time; and although this is not universally correct, it is

sufficiently so to engage and deserve our attention.

The earliest species of popular composition was, as we know, heroic poetry; for the art of transcription being rare, and that of reading very confined, to render any composition popular, it was necessary that, grateful to the ear, it should be easily remembered and repeated; nor was there any method of diffusing it but itinerant recitation.

As great towns arose and spread themselves, however, the poet naturally suited himself to larger audiences, and his muse adopting the drama, attained most that we at present know of theatrical art.

But civilization does not arrive so far as this point without the existence of a large class who, wealthy, indolent, and refined, require some unfatiguing, intellectual amusement, which, if the stage supplied in any way to those resident in cities, it left it still wanting to all who found themselves in the solitude of a country life.

That such a want should first display itself in the east, seems, from the habits of the people, natural; and we may therefore easily fall into the common belief that it was through the

colony of Miletus that

prose

novels or romances

first reached Italy and Greece.

As might have been expected, they treated chiefly of licentious love, and of the martial heroism of the middle ages. This species of composition (whether such alteration were Gothic or Arabian in its origin, or merely the natural birth of the existing state of mankind) received a new colouring; and in tales of chivalry and enterprize the spirit of the day was at once represented and excited.

The wanderings of Palmerin and Amadis, -however, did not extend to the voluptuous Italy, where the Decameron, similar in its kind to other Italian productions that had preceded it, resembled in some sort the ancient Milesian stories.

The pastoral romance was a reaction from the chivalric and heroic, at the head of which Madame Scuderi may be placed-a kind of prolix medley of the two-owing its success in France partly to real personages being concealed under a fictitious genii, partly to the character of the French nobility themselves, who, until their independence was destroyed in the court of Louis XIV, had a warlike and enterprizing frame of mind which the adventures of Polyan

dre or the Great Cyrus' might very well interest and please.

But the two species of modern novels* most in vogue, until another of late years appeared, were those descriptive of living manners-at the head of which Le Sage, transporting comedy from the stage to the boudoir, took his place; and those more analytically descriptive of sentiment, of which we must again accord a foreigner, writing in French, J. J. Rousseau, to be the chief. The one was still a comedian while a novelist; the other always a moralist.

Le Sage wrote for Paris and the audience he had been accustomed to at his theatre: he painted the life of an adventurer to a large city, where every one was struggling to make his fortune-not quite a honest man, yet not a rogue-with few scruples that could prevent his getting on in life: with no crimes that could justly condemn him to the gallies.

* What I say of light literature is almost entirely confined to novels, as the most popular branch of it. The only poets out of the drama of any note, are Beranger and Lamartine, and these are already so well known, and have been so often criticized, that it would hardly be worth while to interrupt the course of these observations by repeating what has frequently been better said of their style and merits.