rpart. The difference between
the French spirit and the English is shown by the fact that with free
thought in the English race came stubborn dissent; in the French,
light-hearted satire. "Satire," as Mr. Van Laun justly says, "is at the
root of the French character, an instinct among the descendants of the
ancient Gauls, who loved to fight and to talk well." This satire broke
out in the sixteenth century with a brightness and causticity which has
ever since distinguished French literature. The leader was Marguerite,
sister to Francis I., the well-known Queen of Navarre. Her "Heptameron"
is a strange book for a woman, and not a bad woman, a lady, and a
queen, to have written. In it "she vents her contemptuous scorn upon
husbands, although [perhaps because] she was married; against monks,
though she was an ardent devotee of religion; against lawyers and
doctors, though she was a queen." But it is most happily added that
"her shrewdest satire of all is unconsciously pointed against herself;
for she stands revealed to us a very woman, the rivals for whose favor
are God and the devil, and who affords to neither of these more than a
short coquettish glance."

It was at this period that the present school of French literature had
its beginning; the spirit then so strongly manifested, the tendency to
clearness, brightness, and high finish of style which then appeared
among French writers, have since that time been the signs and tokens of
the French mind and hand in literature. All that goes before is rude or
fantastic or pedantic; then French literature rises in its splendor; we
can hardly say its grandeur. Mr. Van Laun's first volume is full of
interest which, however, is rather historical than literary; in the
succeeding part of his work we may look for criticism more acceptable
to the general reader.

--We pass easily from this history of the earliest days of French
literature to its very latest, and we may add, one of its most
characteristic productions. Alphonse Daudet's novel, "Fromont Jeune et
Risler Aine," has suddenly attained one of those rare and brilliant
successes which seem possible only in France. Within an incredibly
short time sixty thousand copies of it were sold, and it was "crowned"
by the French Academy; whatever that may mean, whether an actual
crowning of either book or author, it certainly does imply the awarding
of the highest honors by the most eminent literary tribunal in France.
It has now been re