the population.  In these days it is to novels that we chiefly go for pictures of character and manners, and French novels are almost exclusively devoted to pictures of Parisian manners.  Balzac, it is true, has given us delineations of provincial life; but the delineations of Balzac are often more enigmatical than the problems of real life, and even if we could always accept the portraitures they give us as undistorted, they generally presuppose a knowledge on the part of the reader on those points on which the foreigner is most apt to be ignorant.  In any case, we shall be best instructed by a writer who both understands our lack and is able to supply it, and these qualifications, with others scarcely less essential, Mr. Hamerton has brought to his task.  He has thoroughly familiarized himself with French usages, but he has not lost his sense of the difference between them and those of his own land, and of the consequent necessity for explaining as well as describing, and of tracing peculiarities to their source.  If he is free from the common prejudices of the foreign observer, he has not adopted the passions or the partialities of the native.  He can write with fairness of different classes and factions, and can discriminate between ordinary impulses and actions and those that have their origin in strong excitement.  Finally, he neither overloads us with facts and statistics nor seeks to amuse us with fancies or caricatures.  He is always sober and always agreeable.

The matter of this volume was collected during a fixed residence of several years in one of the central provinces of France.  No doubt Mr. Hamerton had a previous acquaintance with the country and with its language far exceeding that of the mere tourist, and his wife, it appears, is a Frenchwoman, the daughter of an ex-prefet.  But he makes few allusions to any former experiences, and draws no comparisons between the conditions of life or the characteristics of the people in different provinces.  This is perhaps to be considered a defect in the book, though it might not have possessed the same attractiveness had its scope been wider.  It is an advantage, too, that the locality was not one which excites curiosity by its strongly marked features or abnormal types.  Travelers often seem to imagine that they have only to tell us about Brittany or Gascony to win our interest, whereas it is precisely such regions that have the least novelty for us, just as the scenery of the Scottish Highlands has been made more familiar to Americans than that of almost any other part of Britain.  Mr. Hamerton’s house, as he gives us clearly to understand, though he suppresses names, was in the neighborhood of Autun.  The situation was a strictly rural one, but with easy access to the town and the feasibility of reaching Paris, Lyons or Geneva in a night’s journey by rail.  It had, he writes, “one very valuable characteristic in great perfection—­namely, variety.  There was nothing in it very striking