economist, prodigiously dull and infinitely conceited—­an exaggerated type of the Hume-Bowring statesman—­and, as is naturally to be expected, our sympathies are awakened for the wretched wife, and we rejoice to see that her beauty and talents, her fine mind and pure ideas, are appreciated by a dashing young fellow, who outwits our original friend the dandy of fifty and the philosophical depute; the whole leaving a pleasing impression on the reader’s mind from the conviction that the heroine is no longer neglected.

From the similarity of these stories—­and they are only taken at random from a great number—­it will be seen that the spirit of almost all of them is the same.  But when we go lower in the scale, and leave the class of philosophic novels, we find their tales of life and manners still more absurd in their total untrueness than the others were hateful in their design.  There is a novel just now appearing in one of the most widely-circulated of the Parisian papers, so grotesquely overdone, that if it had been meant for a caricature of the worst parts of our own hulk-and-gallows authors, it would have been very much admired; but meant to be serious, powerful, harrowing, and all the rest of it, it is a most curious exhibition of a nation’s taste and a writer’s audacity.  The Mysteries of Paris, by Eugene Sue, has been dragging its slow length along for a long time, and gives no sign of getting nearer its denouement than when it began.  A sovereign prince is the hero—­his own daughter, whom he has disowned, the heroine; and the tale commences by his fighting a man on the street, and taking a fancy to his unknown child, who is the inhabitant of one of the lowest dens in the St Giles’ of Paris!  The other dramatis personae are convicts, receivers of stolen goods, murderers, intriguers of all ranks—­the aforesaid prince, sometimes in the disguise of a workman, sometimes of a pickpocket, acting the part of a providence among them, rewarding the good and punishing the guilty.  The English personages are the Countess Sarah McGregor—­the lawful wife of the prince—­her brother Tom, and Sir Walter Murph, Esquire.  These are all jostled, and crowded, and pushed, and flurried—­first in flash kens, where the language is slang; then in country farms, and then in halls and palaces—­and so intermixed and confused, that the clearest head gets puzzled with the entanglements of the story; and confusion gets worse confounded as the farrago proceeds.  How M. Sue will manage ever to come to a close is an enigma to us; and we shall wait with some impatience to see how he will distribute his poetic justice, when he can’t get his puppets to move another step.  Horror seems the great ingredient in the present literary fare of France, and in the Mysteres de Paris the most confirmed glutton of such delicacies may sup full of them.  In the midst of such depraved and revolting exhibitions, it is a sort of satisfaction, though not of the loftiest