all which advantages she possessed in the highest degree-were refined by assiduous industry into a harmonious whole. Betwixt these two extremes of elevated nature, and a delicate, graceful combination of artistical talents, our heroine must be regarded as occupying a middle place. She both embellished nature, and ennobled art by intellectual power. If she did not reach the proud destination of her rivals, her work was a great one, because created by the mind that distilled the material into its own element, while with the others, the material formed the foundation on which a nobler structure was built. It was with Schechner and Sontag as if matter were the father-the producing or creative and with Devrient the motherthe subordinate principle-in a work of

art.

The greatest parts in which our actress appeared were as follows: Leonore, in Fidelio; Julia, in the Vestal; Euryanthe, in Weber's noble work; Donna Anna, in Don Giovanni; Iphigenia, in Gluck's Iphigenia in Tauris; Rezia, in Weber's Oberon; Rebecca, in Marschner's Templar and Jewess, and the Robber-bride of Ries. To these, after she had completed her studies in the Italian school, she added Desdemona, in Othello; and Romeo, in Bellini's Capulets and Montagues. In many others she excelled, but these were her most popular characteristics: and they besides afford an opportunity of comparing her with the two distinguished singers above mentioned. Leonore may be said to be newly created by her; she has soared to a higher range of thought than Schechner; she conquers, not, like Achilles, by superior strength, but like Alexander, by the power of the spirit. It would be interesting to follow her biographer in the parallel he draws between her and Schechner in this part, but the limits of a mere notice forbid us the indulgence. In the Vestal as in Fidelio, her great rival was Schechner, irresistible from the power of her voice. The part was quite another work, though equally effective, in the hands of Madame Devrient. Euryanthe and Desdemona deserve to be mentioned with the above personations; and in these parts a parallel can be drawn between our artiste and Henrietta Sontag. Euryanthe was originally rendered popular by this singer, and Desdemona was one of her

chief parts. But Madame Devrient could not undertake a character without rendering it a formation of her own. The finale in the second act of Euryanthe is made almost a drama of itself by her playing. The heroine stands before her judges; she is guiltless, unembarrassed, but the strange prepara tions cause a slight misgiving. The accusation begins; she repels it with lofty queenlike pride. Lysiart shows the ring, and indicates the half revealed secret; apprehension seizes upon her; anguish oppresses her; her heart throbs with dread; she knows herself entangled in the net. Now she is the victim of consciousness and repentance for what she herself has done; she is crushed; she is humility-submission itself. She follows Adolar in despair, resolved to be faithful through misery to her beloved. These successively unfolded traits, represented with plastic art and the most expressive singing-form one of the noblest pictures ever painted by music. The third act is perhaps richer in effect, but the situations are so well defined, that the most mediocre actress could not fail in them. There the work of an artiste is not so much to create, as to give a masterly execution.

The representation of Desdemona divides itself into three parts; first, that of the silent, submissive daughter; secondly, that in which love for her husband struggles with the anguish of the spurned and outcast child, giving rise to the passionate scenes; thirdly, that of the wife resigned to her fate. Sontag was Madame Devrient's rival in this character, and certainly excelled her, through her great musical talent, in the singing. In the playing, they stand in the same relation as in Euryanthe. Indeed, Sontag seemed fated eminently by nature for the impersonation of Desdemona; her style of beauty corresponded with the expression and feeling in her tones. The subdued harmony of her various qualities gave a magical effect to her acting, and rendered it more pleasing though really not greater, than that of our artiste. But Devrient richly compensated by many admirable traits peculiar to herself. All actresses in the closing scene of the second act sink at the feet of Desdemona's father; our heroine did the same; but her whole action-her every movement-was a work of art, worthy to be immortalized by the pencil or the chisel,

more perfectly with the composer's ideal, and to give voice and deed to his conception. But Madame Devrient was also a great Norma; a German priestess, in whose breast the Italian flames of passion and revenge are not kindled so readily, perhaps, but once kindled, burn with a more untameable power.

But on these and other triumphs of art, we have no further space to dwell. Enough, even by transient glimpses, has been shown, to discover that an artist so highly gifted, was still constrained by effort and industry, to develop what nature had bestowed upon her; to show that the greatest endowments do not exempt their possessor from the common doom of labor. To the magnitude of her exertions, indeed, was it

owing, that the powers she so assiduously cultivated, waned so early, and, that her youthful softness and beauty were, in time, injured by a more harsh and rugged manner. Hers was a clear and rosy morning; and how bright was her sun in its zenith-filling the blue vault with light, and warming earth with its genial beams! She was the pride of her country-kindling all hearts, that could beat for art, with a glow of the purest inspiration! Are we to murmur because that sun at length declines or clouds obscure its splendor? Rather let a blessing follow it even to the verge of the horizon! The laurels of a hundred victories-with which genius has wreathed her brow, can never fade!

IT has always appeared to us a sort of hypocrisy (venial indeed, since it arises only out of vanity), to profess, as some persons are wont to do, an utter contempt for works of fiction, without a single exception. We can well imagine a time when, with but little detriment to mental culture, that department of literature might have received but rare and short notice from those, who, in study, are intent on utility alone. But, since the master spirits of the three last centuries have made fiction subsurvient to the diffusion of their opinions, on subjects most important to society, it savors much, surely, of pedantic vanity, to condemn, as unworthy even of perusal, works upon which Rabelais, Cervantes, Voltaire, Swift, Sterne, Rousseau, Smollet, Richardson, Fielding, Diderot, Chateaubriand De Stael, Goethe, Benjamin Constant, Hugo, Balzac, Bulwer, Scott, Cooper, Grattan, Sedgwick (and Eugene Sue, the great enchanter, who both wove and unravelled the mysteries of Paris), have thrown the high powers of their intellect, and lavished the treasures of their fancies. That such was not the opinion entertained by the ancients, we are justified in asserting, since we find the names of Lucian, Apuleïus, Petronius, and Longus, enrolled in that class of writers we now designate novelists.

The names of Longus and of Apuleius, always familiar to the learned, have become of late well known to general readers, through the translation of the Daphnis and Chloë of the first, and of some fragments of the Golden Ass of the last, by Paul Louis Courier-a production that revealed, at the same time, to Europe a profound Hellenist, and to France the greatest prose writer she has produced since Pascal, in a young officer of the Horse Artillery. Some critics, of that class who ever extol the past for the purpose of depressing the age they live in, have fancied, in the Daphnis and Chloë of

Longus, the original of St. Pierre's lovely impersonation of Paul and Virginia-an absurd comparison, between creations differing as widely as the Polytheism that inspired some of the prurient pages of the Greek, differs from the spiritual faith which, after crowning the fair maiden with the unspotted roses of chastity, placed on the victim of Christian modesty the unwithering wreath of the martyred virgin.

Of Petronius's character (for we do not admit even a doubt as to the identity of the author of the Satyricon, and the Epicurean patrician made immortal by Tacitus) and of his celebrated romance, it is enough to say, that the Prince of Historians has not thought the singular discrepancies of the first, and the masterly execution of the last, subjects unworthy of his attention, while recording the events of the period embraced by his annals. Petronius, the inventor of satirical romance, was the precursor of Rabelais: not, indeed, that the voluptuous Patrician bore any resemblance to the Rector of Meudon, either in mental propensities or in physical organization; but that, like him, he had witnessed the vices of a depraved court. The Roman had sat by the side of Nero-he had kissed the blood-stained hand of the parricide. In lustration of these defilements, the daring Epicurean, unrolling with unpitying hand the silken bandages that hid the foul ulcers of the society in which he had lived, allowed the fetid effluvia to spread around, that youth, innocence and purity might recoil in disgust, ere they had caught the foul infection! Like Rabelais, too, aware of the perils of the task virtue bade him to perform in atonement of his partial yieldings to the depravities of the times, he sought to disguise truth in the garbs of wild, fantastic images-to veil it by uncouth fictions. At intervals, however, ashamed of the mask he wore, he indignantly dashes it to the ground. Tearing from around his limbs