have taxed their readers’ credulity to a pitch which sober Protestants find it very difficult to attain.  Old Tieck or Hoffman introduces you to ghouls and ghosts, and they look on them, themselves, with such awestruck eyes, and treat them in every way with such demonstrations of perfect credence in their being really ghouls and ghosts, that it is not to be denied that strange feelings creep over one in reading their stories at the witching hour, when the fire is nearly out, and the candle-wicks are an inch and a half long.  The Frenchman seldom introduces a ghost—­never a ghoul; but he makes up for it by describing human beings with sentiments which would probably make the ghoul feel ashamed to associate with them.  The utmost extent of human profligacy is depicted, but still the profligacy is human; it is only an amplification—­very clever and very horrid—­of a real character; but never borrows any additional horrors from the other world.  A French author knows very well that the wickedness of this world is quite enough to set one’s hair on end—­for we suspect that the Life in Paris would supply any amount of iniquity—­and professors of the shocking, like Frederick Soulie or Eugene Sue, can afford very well to dispense with vampires and gentlemen who have sold their shadows to the devil.  The German, in fact, takes a short cut to the horrible and sublime, by bringing a live demon into his story, and clothing him with human attributes; the Frenchman takes the more difficult way, and succeeds in it, by introducing a real man, and endowing him with the sentiments of a fiend.  The fault of the one is exaggeration; of the other, miscreation:  redeemed in the first by extraordinary cleverness; in the other, by wonderful belief.  What a contrast between La Motte Fouque and Balzac! how national and characteristic both!  No one can read a chapter of the Magic Ring without seeing that the Baron believes in all the wonders of his tale; a page of the other suffices to show that there are few things on the face of the earth in which he believes at all.  Dim, mystic, childish, with open mouth and staring eyes, the German sees the whole phantasmagoria of the nether world pass before him:  keen, biting, sarcastic—­egotistic as a beauty, and cold-hearted as Mephistopheles—­the Frenchman walks among his figures in a gilded drawing room; probes their spirits, breaks their hearts, ruins their reputation, and seems to have a profound contempt for any reader who is so carried away by his power as to waste a touch of sympathy on the unsubstantial pageants he has clothed for a brief period in flesh and blood.  We confess the sober super-naturalism of the German has less attractions with us, than the grinning infra-naturalism of the Frenchman.  There is more sameness in it, and, besides, it is to be hoped we have at all tines less sympathy for the very best of devils than for the very worst of men.  Luckily for the Frenchman, he has no need to go to the lower regions to procure monsters to