conflict of his mind is decided is one of those touches which makes us feel that M. About is a writer of real power. Lello is stupefied at first, and the very solemnity of the occasion makes him more timid and childish than ever. He begins to count mechanically the flowers of the carpet, without daring to raise his eyes. At last he raises them so as to catch the sight, not of Tolla's face, but of her hands. The poor, thin, white hands set him thinking of all the past happiness he had enjoyed. They had so often pressed his lovingly; the fingers had been so often raised in mirthful rebuke or pretended anger. They had been placed on his lips to make him keep quiet. The left hand still bore the ring which he had placed there in one of the sweetest hours of his life. The sight of these dear hands, rendered almost transparent by anxiety and sorrow, decided him; and he said with a firm and resolved voice, "I swear."

Unfortunately, however, after he had received from Tolla the sacred kiss of his second betrothal, and had returned home, he found tailors and lace-makers awaiting him to measure him for a court-suit. As he did not like to enter with such people on the reason that had now decided him not to leave Rome, he allowed them to go on with their business, and take his measure. He soon got interested in a matter so important; and the cut, length, and decoration of his court-coat soon occupied the whole of a mind that had just been full of the thought of Tolla. Of course he finds that he cannot give up his journey, and announces to Tolla that he must go to England. The poor girl has no other resource except to make him renew his useless oaths, and shave off his moustache, which, she thinks, would do something towards removing the temptation to make love to him, which she is sure all the women who see him must feel. He desires that she shall enter a convent until his return, and she consents. He sets off; and the tidings that reach her in her prison become more and more gloomy, as Lello gets more and more mixed up with the dissipations of foreign capitals. At last he sends her a letter, saying that all hopes of their marriage must be at an end, unless her father can persuade Lello's relatives to consent. The count is furious at this, and goes to consult an uncle of his, who is a cardinal, as to what he ought to do. What follows is one of the most curious parts of the story, and, to persons entirely unfamiliar with Rome, seems almost incredible. The cardinal gives it as his opinion, that since Lello had used an oath in pledging his fidelity to Tolla, and had called God to witness, the matter belonged properly to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical police, and the proper thing to do was to appeal to the cardinal-vicar. The petition of the count to the cardinal-vicar is set out in full, and it has the oddest effect to

see all the incidents of the novel recapitulated in official language. English readers, who are not much affected by the oratory of petitions, will naturally wonder what on earth the cardinal-vicar can be asked to do, and what practical result the petition can be meant to have. We find that the object is to get the cardinal-vicar to explain to the head of Lello's family that, under the circumstances, it is a Christian duty to sanction the marriage. The petition is successful. The cardinal-vicar thinks that it is decidedly a case for his interference. He sends for Lello's uncle; but, alas, Christian duty is a game at which two sides can play. The uncle assents to all his most reverend eminence says, but reveals to him that Lello's father on his death-bed had forbidden the marriage. It was a Christian duty to make Manuel respect his oath, and it was a Christian duty to respect the wishes of the dead; and in this conflict of Christian duties it was impossible to take such a decided step as arranging the marriage. The cardinal-vicar is perfectly overwhelmed with the nicety of the moral problem submitted to him, and writes to Count Feraldi to say that he can do nothing. This is poor Tolla's death-blow, and she fades away like a lily. After her death, all Rome agrees that she is a heroine and a saint, and every one is full of her wrongs. Lello is struck with a kind of milk-and-water remorse, and remains unmarried for the sake of the departed one.

Tolla is a very remarkable story, and is rich in delineation of character, which, quite apart from the materials on which the story is based, would strike us as excellent. But its peculiar charm lies in its portraiture of Roman society and Roman family life, and this must have been the fruit of long and keen observation. M. About has worked very hard before he has produced his best novels; and it so happens, that he has written two books which show how closely he observed, how many facts he collected, and how many persons of all ranks he talked to, before he tried to give the cream of his experience in fiction. La Grèce contemporaine gives the serious side of Le Roi des Montagnes, and La Question Romaine gives the political application of Tolla. We are glad to have these more elaborate productions from M. About's pen, not only for their own sake, but because they show that good stories do not come by chance, and that what seem slight touches are really due to a lively appreciation, whether consciously attained or not, of a great variety of facts. La Grèce contemporaine is a pleasant book, full of pleasant information, and is as interesting as any book about so uninteresting a country as modern Greece can be. M. About has also published a volume of art-criticism, which is elaborate and sensible, and shows that he has studied the works

of many different schools with a wish to form an independent judgment, and a desire to understand by patient examination the relative merits of great painters. Generally, the comic novelist is not much given to study. In this country the most he ordinarily does is to look into some odd volumes at the British Museum, and to work up his discoveries into what is called a Tale of Manners. But M. About distinguishes himself from the tribe, not only because his comedy is light, refined, and sparkling, but also because he goes through a considerable amount of serious work, and does what he does thoroughly. In one instance, indeed, he appears to us to have victimised his readers to his own appetite for useful information. In a novel called Maitre Pierre he gives an account of the improvements which are being gradually introduced into the cultivation of the barren landes of France. It is very proper, of course, that an intelligent Frenchman should interest himself in a subject so important to his country; but the statistics of the proposed improvements are very dry work. They are even made more dry by the introduction of a sort of faint story, and by the constant intervention of Maître Pierre, one of those marvellously sagacious and self-denying peasants whom George Sand loves to draw. For once, we must own, M. About has taken up a subject, and failed to make it attractive. To that large portion of the English public that does not much care to know how the waste-lands of France are reclaimed, the value of Maitre Pierre is principally to show that the author is a painstaking man, and that therefore the facts which he brings into more entertaining books may be relied on with tolerable confidence.

M.

M. About must have been amply rewarded for all the labour he had ever undergone when the time came for him to write and publish La Question Romaine. It is seldom that an author has a subject exactly to suit, almost entirely new, and capable of being treated so as to gratify all his tastes and display all his powers; it is equally seldom that such a book is the book that every one wants and is looking for, and that it immediately. exercises a direct and conspicuous political influence. About's volume was a real triumph. It gave the world unanswerable reasons for the denunciation of the temporal power of the Pope; it gave these reasons in a way that forced the most lazy to read, and the most stupid to laugh; it gave the author an opportunity of settling a score with the priests, which must have gone to the heart of a Voltairian; and it bore rich fruit at once, and acted on the public opinion of Europe so strongly as to make the violent restoration of the Romagna to the Pope simply impossible. It was a success such as Voltaire used to win in the height of his reputation, and it was a success. won very much in the manner in which Voltaire would have won it.

C

!

Substantially, M. About's work is after the manner of Voltaire; but a century has altered the fashion of writing, and the taste of the present age demands that controversial essays should present features that were not thought of when Voltaire wrote. In order to smash the position of his adversary, we now ask that a writer should tell us what he considers to be the facts of the case. We want to see that he knows what he is talking about. We like epigrams, but cannot consent to be entirely governed by them. The epigrammatist must first make out a case which would be tolerably satisfactory in the hands of a dry statistician; he must not deal wholly in philosophical generalities, or merely introduce a few casual statements that have the air of being invented. This necessity for building wit on exact observation just suits M. About. It is the turn of his mind to be inventive in language, but not in thought. He must have a good basis for fiction and smart writing supplied to him from some extraneous source, and then he is at home. He is not a man of deep thought or fertile imagination; but he knows that facts are not to be got at without trouble, and that they are not convincing unless stated in considerable detail. He works hard, and states fully. This habit. of mind, which led him to write the conscientious but wearisome tale of Maitre Pierre, stood him in excellent stead when he had to deal with a question of current politics. He does not let off the papal government with a few ineffective generalities. He gives facts, very minute, very systematic, and very convincing. He goes thoroughly into the real, every-day, prosaic results of priestly government. He examines the amount, in hectares, of land that is wasted by being held in mortmain. He calculates exactly how much the papal revenue costs to collect. He gives an elaborate table to show the fortunes of the Roman nobles. When he has to tell us that there are some clever and eminent laymen even in Rome, he gives us the names of the leading sculptors, painters, and engravers. It is this detail that carries us with him. It makes us feel, not only that we laugh at his bidding, but that he has a right to bid us to laugh. He has personally travelled over almost every part of the Roman territory. He can give us a local reference for every assertion, and he has seen the greater part of what he describes. His book, therefore, ended the question whether the papal government was a decent and a tolerable government, and left only the question unsettled whether, however bad, it must be endured.

There is also another difference between Voltaire and M. About. It was the task of M. About to show up the priests, to make them ridiculous, and to put them out of the pale of serious discussion. This would have been an office that Voltaire

would have had as keen a pleasure in fulfilling as any one who ever breathed. But he would have gone to work in a manner that is considered quite inadmissible at the present day: he would have scoffed at the religion of the priests even more than at their follies, and would have merged his attack on the papal government in a general denunciation of Christianity. The times have changed, and M. About admirably represents the change. There is not a word in his book that can be construed into an attack on Christianity. He does not indulge in fierce sarcasms against priests and every thing priestly; he merely treats them good humouredly, as if he were on a level much above that which they occupy, and they afforded him amusement by the pranks and follies they were kind enough to exhibit. He does not insult them, he merely makes fun of them. He gives his sentences a hundred little turns which serve to remind us how infinitely a man of the world is superior to such a creature as a Roman monk. He affixes to them a character of imbecility and of the most grotesque meanness; and he thus creates an impression which is more adverse to ecclesiastical government than any which could be produced by the most savage and sustained attack.

There is a good instance of the treatment of religious questions adopted by M. About in a description he gives of the feast of St. Anthony, as celebrated by the peasants in the neighbourhood of Rome. There is no expression that can exactly be objected to, and yet the result is to make the popular religion seem intensely silly. He tells us that if we wish to estimate rightly the zeal and simplicity of these peasants, we must watch them on a feast-day. Men, women, and children, all run to the church; a carpet of flowers is strewn on the road, and joy beams on every countenance. You ask what it can be that causes this. It is the feast of St. Anthony. The mass is chanted and music played in honour of St. Anthony. A procession is organised to fête the saint: the little boys disguise themselves as angels; the men put on the habit of their societies. Here are the peasants of the Heart of Jesus, here those of the Name of Mary, here the Souls of Purgatory. The procession gets slightly confused; they kiss and kick and fight, all in honour of St. Anthony. At last the statue comes out of the church: it is a wooden doll with very red cheeks. Victory! The crackers go off, the women cry for joy, the babies cry at the top of their voice, " Long live St. Anthony!" In the evening there are splendid fireworks, and a balloon, shaped so as to resemble the image of the saint, mounts above the church and bursts magnificently. "St. Anthony would be very hard to please if such a homage did not go straight to his heart; and the peasants would be very exacting