M. Lespars are a plate of white worms, a bushel of
grasshoppers, and a broil of magpies seasoned with the slugs that
infest certain green berries. One regards this announcement with more
or less incredulity; but little doubt seems to hang over the assertion
that the dormouse has just been introduced into the list of French
game-dishes. The puzzle for the cooks seems to be with regard to the
proper sauce for the new delicacy; but this matter does not trouble
the little chimney-sweeps, who find the animal so long associated in
poetry and in fact chiefly with their own humble career, now rising
to the dignity of game, and commanding a price for the table. Piedmont
has thus far furnished the larger part of the displays of _marmottes_
in Paris stalls. The chief trouble in making rats, magpies and other
delicacies of that sort really popular amongst the poorer classes is
that the latter do not possess adroit cooks to disguise the original
flavor under aromatic adjuncts, nor yet the money to buy the necessary
spices and side-dishes, nor the high grade of champagne wines with
which the wealthy and noble patrons of "food reform" commonly wash
down unpalatable viands.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Rousseau. By John Morley. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall.

It was in the natural course of things that modern criticism,
ever aiming at a wider comprehension, a keener analysis, a greater
independence of judgment and expression, should test itself anew on a
subject affording so full a scope and so sure a touchstone as the life
and writings of Rousseau. The character of Rousseau, with its strange
blending of delicate beauty and repulsive infirmity, requires to be
handled with the firm but tender and sympathetic touch which the nurse
or the physician lays upon a child afflicted with sores. His career,
with its alternations of obscurity and conspicuousness, of tumult and
torpidity, of wretchedness and rapture, must be followed with an
eye keen to detect the springs and alive to the subtle play of
circumstance and impulse. His influence, if not more profound, more
varied, extensive and direct than that of any thinker and writer since
Luther, is to be traced in the whole history of his own and of later
times, under manifold aspects and amid momentous changes of spirit and
of form. In the case of most men who have helped to mould the
ideas and direct the tendencies of an age, it would be difficult to
determine what each has contributed