n Pont Royal and
the Exhibition. The steamer will be thirty metres, or one hundred feet
long and three and a half metres, or eleven feet eight inches broad,
and is to make forty-five miles an hour! The length is to the beam,
therefore, as 8-1/2 to 1. It is singular that marine engineering has
gained but little from these attempts to attain excessive speeds. The
real advances have been obtained by small successive improvements.

CURRENT LITERATURE.

MR. HENRI VAN LAUN is known in the world of letters by his admirable
translation of Taine's "History of English Literature," and also by his
not yet completed translation of Moliere's works; the latter being not
merely a translation, but a very thoroughly worked English edition of
the great French dramatist. He now presents us with the first volume of
an original critical work of great importance and interest[9]--nothing
less than a history of French literature. Mr. Van Laun's work is not a
mere critical appreciation of French writers, which of itself would be
an undertaking of very considerable moment, and which would fill a
place hitherto unoccupied in our critical literature. The present work
is in fact a history of French thought, and even more; it is a history
of the French people as exhibited in the writings of Frenchmen from the
very earliest period. The author accepts the theory which has lately
come into vogue among the more elaborate, if not the profounder
critics, that the literature of an age is a manifestation of its
spirit; that a nation, or rather a people, has a soul like an
individual man, and that that soul is manifested and is to be read in
the pages of its authors; that as it, the people, is developed,
intellectually, morally, socially, and politically, from age to age,
the changes through which it passes are reflected in its literature,
and that there no less, perhaps even more, than in the record of its
doings at home, abroad, in the family, in society, in commerce, in
manufactures, in art, and on the field of battle, is to be found its
true portraiture. Indeed, he begins his book with the assertion that
"the history of a literature is the history of a people; if not this,
it is worthless."

[9] "_History of French Literature._" By HENRI VAN LAUN. I. From
its Origin to the Renaissance. 8vo, pp. 342. New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons.

To this theory and its general acceptance we owe chiefly the very wide
scope and the philosoph