rs,
is a work of far different style and scope from his first great success.

Among the rising writers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ the name of
Andre Theuriet is rapidly becoming prominent. As chaste, as tender, as
sincere as Daudet, if less gifted and poetical, he depicts provincial
life and manners with scarcely less skill than does his brilliant
contemporary the factory and the salons of the Marais. He is, above all,
an adorer of the woods--not such wild virgin forests as may still be
met with in our own land, but the decorous and well-trained woods of
France, where the very trees seem to have learned politeness and keep to
their own places, not one of them daring to tower to an undue height or
to spread its roots or branches over an unaccustomed breadth of space.
Born at Marly-le-Roi, his youth was spent at Bar-le-Duc, and in his
mature manhood he was transferred to Auberive--three points where his
love of forests could be indulged in to any extent. Something of the
freshness, the summer sweetness, the natural charm of his favorite
haunts seems to pervade the atmosphere of his graceful and delicate
tales. He is one of the few French novelists one can imagine writing in
English. _Gerard's Marriage_, _Angele's Fortune_, _An Undine_, are all
imbued with that peculiar quality which the French call _honnetete_--an
expression for which our language furnishes no equivalent. Neither
striking in incident nor complicated in plot, his stories charm by their
delicate delineations of character, their refinement of tone and
sincerity of sentiment, and their truthfulness of description. His
stories remind one of what Miss Mulock's novels used to be when she
wrote her best, while Daudet might be characterized as a Parisian
mingling of Hawthorne and Bret Harte, and Zola as a brutal Thackeray.

M. Jules Claretie has written many novels. But he has also written
plays, histories, biographies, leading articles: he is the most
indefatigable of writers, as he is one of the most intelligent and
clear-headed. He has, however, the defect of being a literary Don Juan,
wasting his smiles amid the _mille e tre_ instead of consecrating his
pen in legitimate wedlock to a single Muse. The immense facility with
which he writes is fatal to the enduring success of his novels. They
abound in powerful episodes and strong bits of description, and here and
there some single scene, original in conception and forcible in
treatment, starts out from the m