The Project Gutenberg EBook of International Weekly Miscellany Of
Literature, Art, and Science, by Various

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Title: International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science
Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4.

Author: Various

Release Date: July 29, 2004 [EBook #13053]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY ***

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, William Flis, the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team and Cornell University

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY MISCELLANY

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

* * * * *

Vol. I. NEW YORK, JULY 22, 1850. No. 4.

* * * * *

LITERARY COTERIES IN PARIS IN THE LAST CENTURY.

The revolutions of society are almost as sure if not as regular as
those of the planets. The inventions of a generation weary after
a while, but they are very likely to be revived if they have once
ministered successfully to pleasure or ambition. The famous coteries
in which learning was inter-blended with fashion in the golden age
of French intelligence, are being revived under the new Republic,
and women are again quietly playing with institutions and liberties,
perhaps as dangerously as when Mesdames de Tencin, Pompadour,
Geoffrin, Deffant, Popliniere and L'Espinasse assembled the destinies
nightly in their drawing rooms.

The tendency to such associations is displayed also in most of our
own cities. The Town and Country Club of Boston, the Wistar Parties
in Philadelphia, the Literary Club in Charleston, the recent
_converzaziones_ at the houses of President Charles King of Columbia
College, and others, and the well-known Saturday Evenings at Miss
Lynch's, where literature and art and general speculation have for
some seasons had a common center, all illustrate the disposition of an
active and cultivated society, not engrossed by special or spasmodic
excitements, to cluster by rules of feeling and capacity: and clusters
of passion and mind are rarely for a long period inert. When they
become common they are apt to assume the direction of private custom
and public opinion and affairs.

In view o