of this living cream." He throws his
hat into the river to teach her the laws of gravity. But she grows up
ungrateful and estranged, and, having married an ambitious physician,
allows her father to live as a neglected pensioner under a part of her
roof. The details of Babolain's decline are exquisitely painful, but
partake of that style of exaggeration and caricature which causes even
the heartless beings who make up his world to seem more like grotesque
puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really
execrated and condemned. As the abused victim, starving and ragged,
treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by
the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we
withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a
Pere Goriot. The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly
between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies
and good things: we could hardly indicate another imported novel of
the length actually containing so much. Nothing can be more comical
than the grand airs of the ladies, whether in their poor or rich
estate, or than the perpetual suite of victimizations endured by the
helpless Babolain: the muses of Comedy and Tragedy rush together over
the stage to crush this fly with their buskins. The translator of
_Babolain_ reveals his quality by calling pantaloons, in several
places, _pants_, and by adopting an ugly locative common enough in New
York--"Perhaps I did not have that amount," for "perhaps I had not,"
etc. The work revels in that buff binding which has given to the
_Leisure Hour Series_ the popular sobriquet of the "Linen Duster
Series," a livery now well known as the certain indication of honest
entertainment and literary excellence.

Impressions et Souvenirs. Par George Sand. Paris: Levy Freres; New
York: F.W. Christern.

This little collection of papers is made from Madame Sand's private
journal, the extracts being sometimes recent and sometimes thirty
years old, sometimes short and sometimes improved into essays, and
in any case stitched together by the slightest of threads. A few
allusions, hardly important enough to be called anecdotes, reveal the
relations of the authoress with the great men of the time, and the
least momentous recital becomes charming from the assured ease and
native grace of this veteran artist's style. One amusing reminiscence
is the odd paradox of Theophile Gautier, that pl