et unsettled and struggling society in which so much
of the old has been irretrievably destroyed, and so little of the
new has been solidly constructed--there are much greater varieties,
infinitely more subtle grades and distinctions, in the region of life
which lies between respectability and disgrace, than can be found in a
country like ours. The French novels and dramas may apply less a mirror
than a magnifying-glass to the beings that move through that region. But
still those French novels and dramas do not unfaithfully represent
the classifications of which they exaggerate the types. Those
strange combinations, into one tableau, of students and grisettes;
opera-dancers, authors, viscounts, swindlers, romantic Lorettes,
gamblers on the Bourse, whose pedigree dates from the Crusades;
impostors, taking titles from villages in which their grandsires might
have been saddlers--and if detected, the detection but a matter of
laugh; delicate women living like lawless men; men making trade out
of love, like dissolute women, yet with point of honour so nice, that,
doubt their truth or their courage, and--piff! you are in Charon's
boat,--humanity in every civilised land may present single specimens,
more or less, answering to each thus described. But where, save in
France, find them all, if not precisely in the same salons, yet so
crossing each other to and fro as to constitute a social phase, and give
colour to a literature of unquestionable genius? And where, over orgies
so miscellaneously Berecynthian, an atmosphere so elegantly Horatian?
And where can coarseness so vanish into polished expression as in that
diamond-like language--all terseness and sparkle--which, as friendly
to Wit in its airiest prose, as hostile to Passion in its torrent of
cloud-wrack of poetry, seems invented by the Grace out of spite to the
Muse?

Into circles such as those of which the dim outline is here so
imperfectly sketched, Jasper Losely niched himself, as _le bel Anglais_.
(Pleasant representative of the English nation!) Not that those circles
are to have the sole credit of his corruption. No! Justice is justice!
Stand we up for our native land! _Le bel Anglais_ entered those circles
a much greater knave than most of those whom he found there. But
there, at least, he learned to set a yet higher value on his youth, and
strength, and comeliness--on his readiness of resource--on the reckless
audacity that browbeat timid and some even valiant men-