presence now inspires ordinary persons only with disgust.  A naturalist who devotes himself to eating such creatures with a motive so philanthropic deserves our praise, though we may not be able to personally imitate his heroic example.  Among the choice dishes mentioned by one paper as selected to figure at the first public banquet of 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 to the general result, or to say with certainty that the work performed by one would not, if he had been wanting, have been equally accomplished by others.