advice. Yet she
never encouraged eccentricity. 'Be correct,' she writes to Eugene
Pelletan, 'that is rarer than being eccentric, as the time goes. It is
much more common to please by bad taste than to receive the cross of
honour.'

On the whole, her literary advice is sound and healthy. She never
shrieks and she never sneers. She is the incarnation of good sense. And
the whole collection of her letters is a perfect treasure-house of
suggestions both on art and on politics.

_Letters of George Sand_. Translated and edited by Raphael Ledos de
Beaufort. (Ward and Downey.)

BERANGER IN ENGLAND
(_Pall Mall Gazette_, April 21, 1886.)

A philosophic politician once remarked that the best possible form of
government is an absolute monarchy tempered by street ballads.

Without at all agreeing with this aphorism we still cannot but regret
that the new democracy does not use poetry as a means for the expression
of political opinion. The Socialists, it is true, have been heard
singing the later poems of Mr. William Morris, but the street ballad is
really dead in England. The fact is that most modern poetry is so
artificial in its form, so individual in its essence and so literary in
its style, that the people as a body are little moved by it, and when
they have grievances against the capitalist or the aristocrat they prefer
strikes to sonnets and rioting to rondels.

Possibly, Mr. William Toynbee's pleasant little volume of translations
from Beranger may be the herald of a new school. Beranger had all the
qualifications for a popular poet. He wrote to be sung more than to be
read; he preferred the Pont Neuf to Parnassus; he was patriotic as well
as romantic, and humorous as well as humane. Translations of poetry as a
rule are merely misrepresentations, but the muse of Beranger is so simple
and naive that she can wear our English dress with ease and grace, and
Mr. Toynbee has kept much of the mirth and music of the original. Here
and there, undoubtedly, the translation could be improved upon; 'rapiers'
for instance is an abominable rhyme to 'forefathers'; 'the hated arms of
Albion' in the same poem is a very feeble rendering of 'le leopard de
l'Anglais,' and such a verse as

'Mid France's miracles of art,
Rare trophies won from art's own land,
I've lived to see with burning heart
The fog-bred poor triumphant stand,

reproduces very inadequately the charm of the original: