THE LAUREATE À LA FRANÇAIS. WE E have often heard Frenchmen complain that we English really knew nothing of French literature, that our insular prejudices blinded us alike to its beauties and its blemishes, that its caustic wit and subtle humour, its passionate sentiment and profound philosophy, were altogether unappreciated in Great Britain. On the contrary, we have heard it stoutly maintained by the most patriotic of our islanders that the Gauls never thoroughly understand themselves that here, and here only, are their authors properly comprehended. This opinion is favoured by the fact that most of our successful modern dramas are traceable to Parisian origin, and that the novels of French novelists are tolerably familiar to many English novel-readers.

"Done into English." Such was the old-fashioned expression for the reproduction of a foreign work. And the phrase is expressive; a book done into English is Anglicised—the verbal accuracy of the mere translation is disregarded, the doer into English seizes upon the writer's thoughts and sentiments whenever it is practicable, upon the very words and the result is generally satisfactory—the literary medium says exactly what his author means, but says it like an Englishman. The chief difficulty in this process is to find your skilled workman. You want more than a labourer, more than an artisan; you need an artist, if not of equal ability with the author whom he does into English, at least with a mind and heart capable of thoroughly appreciating and understanding his author.

Now if all this applies to the doing of any French work into English, it applies also to the doing of any English work into French. English authors, as a rule, are less known and less appreciated in France than French authors are in England. It is farther from Calais to Dover than it is from Dover to Calais. The Londoner reaches Paris, and there lays up his staff, far oftener than the Parisian carries

his light cane to Leicester-square. We know a great deal more about the French than the French know about us. In a popular French journal we read some time since a description of metropolitan life-oh, so new! It was illustrated with engravings. Among the pictures was one purporting to represent the "Last Meeting of the Anti-Corn Law League in St. Paul's Cathedral." Dumas in his George IV. crowds together the most extravagant blunders-Sir Brougham is the man of men, and well pleased are the populace who break into the House of Peers and pelt the members to hail him as their chief. When Mr. Arthur Sketchley gives his comical account of the critic on Shakspeare, and his new interpretation of Macbeth's soliloquy on the air-drawn dagger, there is really very little exaggeration in the picture.

But there are indications of a change for the better on the other side of the Channel. It is very freely acknowledged that "perfidious Albion" can boast a few respectable names in letters, and no man has done more to bring about this alteration in public opinion than M. Taine in his Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. In the fourth volume of this really clever book the author deals with contemporary writersDickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Mill, and the Poet Tennyson.

It is our purpose to sit for awhile at the feet of our French critic, and to follow him in his literary, critical, biographical notices of these famous men, and, reversing his order of arrangement, we shall inquire, first of all, what he knows and what he thinks about

ALFRED TENNYSON.

Tennyson's earliest productions, M. Taine tells us, were sharply criticised, and for ten years his name was seen neither in review nor catalogue; but when he reappeared before the public his poems made their way throughout the land, and at one stroke he rose to be the acknowledged poet of his country and age.

It was a surprise, but a pleasant surprise. The generation of great poets had passed away. Like their predecessors of the sixteenth century, they had carried and precipitated everything to extremes. They had collected gigantic legends, accumulated dreams, culled from the East, Greece, and Arabia; had surcharged the human imagination with the lines and fantasies of all climes; they had entered on the domain of metaphysics and morals, indefatigably dreaming on human existence, growing sometimes sublime, and often monotonous; they had dashed into crime and heroism, had promenaded among the shades in the company of figures contracted and terrible, terrifying by their remorse, illuminating by their grandeur. Contrasted with this imaginative, sentimental, and Satanic school, Tennyson was exquisite. All his thoughts, all his expressions, were marked by grace and beauty; his poetry was like a fine summer evening-the objects in the landscape were the same during the day, but the effect was softened in the delicious twilight-vegetation was refreshed, and there was harmonious charm over everything.

In such a strain as this M. Taine sets forth the claims of the Laureate, and Alfred the Great has no reason to quarrel with his critic. M. Taine says that our attention is first attracted by the female portraits of Tennyson-Adeline, Elenora, Lilian, the May Queen, are personages of the Keepsake drawn by a lover and an artist. The keepsake, he explains, is gilt-edged, enriched with flowers and other ornaments, filled with figures always delicate and correct, designed for the soft white hands of the young bride, or the girl bursting into womanhood. But monsieur declines to reproduce the female portraits in French, because each word is a tint, curiously heightened or deepened by the neighbour