Sensitiveness to disagreeable things im- on principle, support this degree of preten. plies self-mistrust. Only absolutely self-re- sion. There is a tacit agreement in society liant people are impervious to them. We that every individual in it fills his proper are dependent on others, more than we think, place, and that he and his belongings are for even our own good opinion. We think what they go for-that all our externals fulbest of ourselves when others share our fa- fil their professions. There is no hypocrisy vorable impressions, and no strength of con- in assuming this of every one we meet. It stancy can prevent our estimate of our friends is simply not obtruding our private judgment suffering some faint fluctuations according to where its expression would be an impertithe view which others take of them. All nence. The disagreeable thing jars on this people have an idea of their own position nice adjustment. The speaker has the untowards the world-though "idea" is, per- justifiable aim of lowering this fancied elevahaps, too definite a term at any rate, a tion, whether moral or social; and he disdim assumption of a certain standing of pels illusions, not as he supposes, in the which they are scarcely aware till it is in-interest of truth on any social or moral view, fringed, and which it is the part of the sayer but really for selfish ends. He obeys an unof disagreeable things to infringe. We are amiable impulse to prove that he is knoweach the centre of our own world, and thus ing where we are ignorant, wise where we have a place in our own eyes which no one are foolish, strong where we are weak-that can give us. Something of this half-delu- he sees into us and through us, and that it sion is indispensable to carry us through our is, before all things, important that this parts creditably, and the laws of politeness, should be declared and made evident.

announce ;

And yet, though the inference perhaps may be
bitter,

You are forced to admit that the statement was
"bounce".

The mere trick of an orator eager to glitter.

A barbarous war may persistently rage,

And hurry two nations to utter perdition,
Whole counties may starve, yet our Gladstone,
the sage,

Though he thinks it, quite right, wont advise
Recognition.

The plan, though ingenious, is certainly old-
'Tis one thing to act and another to chatter:
Esop tells of the man who blew hot and blew
cold,

And thereby extremely astonished a Satyr.

Let us hope that from henceforth delusions are
filed,

And that all your admirers the absolute folly

If the calculation were increased ten years further, it would show the debt to be 640, and the people 1296-more than double. L.

From The Examiner, 25 Oct.
THE GOLD DISCOVERIES.

THE early predictions of this journal respecting the results of the modern gold discoveries have been fully verified during the last fourteen years, for it is. fourteen years since we first discussed the subject. Observing that an influx of some fifty or sixty millions' worth of gold, poured suddenly, and within a period of three or four years into a narrow and unprepared market, had produced no sensible effect on prices, we came to the conclusion that no future addition in a necessarily wider market was likely to do so. Our view has been justified by at least ten years' experience.

and Peru, the yield is unlimited, and the quantity of metal annually supplied by the mines is well known to depend on the high or low price of the chief instrument of reduction, quicksilver. The old mines of this metal were confined to two narrow localities, and there they were monopolies under which the average price was about five shillings a pound. New and far more productive mines have been discovered in California; the working of these has brought the price of mercury down to one shilling and tenpence a pound, and hence the new silver to balance the new gold.

The enormous influx of the precious metals which has taken place has produced no depreciation of their own value, nor increased the price of the commodities they represent. There has been no increase in the cost of any commodity where the supply was equal to the demand. There has, for example, been no rise of price in any kind of corn or in any

But let us attempt now to compute the value of the new gold which from first to last has been poured into the market of the world. It can be but an approximation, for the nature of the subject forbids all hope of correctness. The mines of California continue at their highest produce. But those of Vic-metal. There has been no rise in the prices toria have fallen off; the decline being, we conceive, fully made up by greater productiveness in those of New South Wales, and by the discovery of the gold fields of New Zealand and British Columbia. We may compute the annual produce of all the new mines at the moderate sum of £20,000,000 a-year, which, multiplied by fourteen years, will make the whole influx amount to £280,000,000. Meanwhile the supply from the old sources has not diminished; nor is there any good reason why it should, seeing that there has been no fall in the price of the article.

of wool, hemp, flax, or jute. There has been none in sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa. There has been even a reduction in the price of some commodities, the result of new discoveries or more economical processes of manufacture, as in the example of quicksilver already mentioned, and of some descriptions of iron. Wherever a rise of price has taken place, the special grounds for it are transparent. There has been a great rise in the price of the potato, from a notorious disease in the plant; but that rise preceded by several years the gold discoveries. There has been a great rise in the price of wine and silk, from a disBut this is not all of the precious metals ease in the vine and a murrain in the silkthat has been thrown into the world's mar- worm; but these rises did not take place ket. The relative values of gold and silver until several years after the gold mines had are at present substantially the same that been at their highest production. For twelve they were before the appearance of the new out of the fourteen years since the first gold; that is, gold has sustained no depre- gold discoveries, there had been no permaciation, nor silver increase of value. It fol-nent rise in the price of cotton. A furious lows therefore that there must have taken place a production of new silver equal in value to that of the new gold; so that, in fact, within the brief period of fourteen years, the precious metals have been poured into the markets of the world to the extent of the prodigious sum of £560,000,000, over and above the old normal supply.

How this silent production of new silver has come about deserves explanation. In the principal producing countries, Mexico

and most pernicious civil strife in the chief producing country, far worse than the oideon in the vine, or the murrain in the silk caterpillar, has cut off eight-tenths of the whole supply, and the normal price of past years has been multiplied four and even five fold.

Since, then, there has been no depreciation of the precious metals or increase in the price of the commodities they represent, what has been the actual effect produced by the vast influx of them which has taken place within

1

the last fourteen years? We have not a however, correct, for India furnishes most
doubt but that in so far as they have been of the countries bordering on it. India, no
used as money-and that is their main em- doubt, is a great importer, because it has
ployment-they have acted as stimulants to neither gold nor silver of its own. To call it
the production of new wealth, and been them- a sink on this account is not a whit better
selves absorbed in its representation. In a than to call it a sink of copper, tin, and zinc,
word, the wealth of the whole world, or at none of which it produces itself, but which
least of all the civilized parts of it, has been it imports largely, and does not re-export.
increased by a sum equal to double the China, which has both gold and silver of its
amount of the gold and silver which has own, and all the metals just referred to, im-
been of late years poured into it.
ports and exports gold and silver at its con-
venience, like any European country.

Evidences of the prosperity produced by
the influx of the precious metals is readily
Much of the silver of France, Germany,
found. It has, as might be expected, been and other parts of Europe has been sent to
most striking at the sources of discovery, India and China and replaced by gold, and
California and Australia. There the wages this is supposed to have contributed to keep
of labor have been more than doubled, and up the price of gold, and to account for the
the population more than trebled. Austra- absence of depreciation in it. But the oper-
lia, with a population of 1,200,000, consumes ation is a mere transfer of localities produced
at their English valuation £10,000,000 worth | by the demands of trade, leaving the quanti-
of British and colonial productions, besides
much received from India, its islands, China
and Western America. The history of the
world affords no example of such prosperity
within so short a time. Both there and in
California flourishing and populous towns
have arisen, whose very foundations were
hardly laid before the gold discoveries.

With ourselves, our imports and our exports have both been doubled,-a result unknown at any previous period of our commercial history within so brief a time. Even the wages of labor have risen, without any rise in the cost of the necessaries of life. What is still more remarkable, the wages of labor have greatly risen in stagnant India, where they had been fixed and stationary for many a century-all the work of the many millions' worth of silver which Britain has poured into it for the last ten years.

ties of the two metals just what they were; for the wide world, and not France and Germany, is the market of the precious metals. In one quarter, and to our very great surprise, we find the gold of California (about £180,000,000) supposed to have been absorbed in replacing the paper money of the United States of America. But the paper money of America is far more abundant at this moment than it was before the gold discoveries, and gold, by the latest accounts, at a premium of twenty-nine per cent. and promising to be at a much higher one.

If the new gold and silver were to undergo depreciation from excess of quantity, that result ought to have happened long ago, while the supply was at the highest point and the market for it at the narrowest. Now that the supply is stationary and the market greatly expanded, we must come to the sure concluTo the minor causes which have contrib- sion that there is no chance at all of depreuted to the consumption of the new gold and ciation. Fixed incomes, then, will suffer silver, we attach little importance, because nothing; debtors will not be afforded an opthey are only the same which have always portunity of paying their debts in sovereigns been in operation, and now only greater be- intrinsically worth only ten shillings, nor will cause there is more gold and silver to con- the nation be able to pay off half its debt by sume. There is more of gold and silver used defrauding its creditors of half their incomes. in the arts, but simply for no other reason Allowing the handsome sum of £60,000,000 than because there are more persons than for plate and jewelry, the world, according before that can afford to purchase plate and to our view, is by a thousand millions sterjewelry. India has been called a sink of the ling richer than it was fourteen short years precious metals, because it receives much and ago,-consequently more powerful, and, let and exports none; the last conclusion is not, us hope, not less virtuous and happy.

From The Saturday Review.

carefully edited at the expense of the Government, and the modern school of French historians has deservedly earned a very high reputation. Much, however, will always res

THE SOURCES OF FRENCH LITERATURE.* FOR the last two or three years the press of Paris has been wonderfully prolific, and in the numbers of its offspring has far sur-main to be done where the materials are so passed the publishing activity of every other rich and the subject so vast, NotwithstandEuropean capital. This exuberant fertility ing the labors of Guizot and Thierry, there is, no doubt, favorable to the production of is ample room for new-comers, who only much which, if not absolutely worthless, is labor under the disadvantage of having to merely ephemeral. There are, however, very follow leaders whose achievements it may numerous exceptions to the average medi- prove difficult to equal. ocrity. Many real students have of late The aim of M. Moland's essay is rather produced, either in the form of essay or crit- an ambitious one, and its title seems to icism, very valuable contributions to con- promise more than is performed; it is, howtemporary literature. Among the better ever, a very useful contribution to the his class of literary men there seems to prevail tory of early French literature, and is obvia remarkable disposition to follow out liter- ously the result of long and careful study of ary or historical researches in a careful and a very difficult subject. He proposes to conscientious manner. It may be true that trace the development of three branches of the Second Empire has not yet been made French literature, starting from the period illustrious by the appearance of any single when the debased Latin passed into the work that will take its place among the great | classics of France; but there can be no question that literature, generally speaking, is in as favorable a condition as it was during the reign of Louis Philippe. And it may well be that the imperial system, which excludes all free discussion from the arena of politics, has induced many active-minded men to devote to literary studies the energies which might otherwise have been given to politics. At the present moment the questions which most interest France and Europe are forbidden ground to all except the slavish advocates of Napoleonism. No French thinker can venture to speak his mind on the Roman question, or even on the Mexican expedition; but there is ample liberty to prosecute philosophical inquiries into the state of opinion in the age of Charlemagne, or the administration of France in the reign of Henri IV. Fortunately, the history of France and its language is an inexhaustible mine, and we have every reason to be grateful to those who explore it with so much zeal and patience. Each new investigation may add something to our knowledge of bygone times, and is made more valuable when followed out with the rules of scientific examination and the light of modern history. Of late years a vast deal has been done for French history. Many important manuscripts have been printed and * Origines Littéraires de la France. Par Louis Moland. Didier et Compagnie. Paris: 1862.

French of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
He successively examines the early romances
and legends in prose, the origin of the
drama, and the language and character of
the early French preaching. These three
forms of intellectual development, apparently
so distinct, all sprang from the same origin.
They were all the offspring of the Church,
and in different ways they all attempted to
give expression to a religious and devotional
sentiment. Romance, in the first instance,
was intimately connected with, or rather
formed a portion of, the religious legend.
It soon became distinct from it, but long
retained the traces of its origin. Similarly,
the drama was, in its infancy, purely sacer-
dotal. It remained so for a considerable
time. Gradually it included profane as well
as sacred subjects, but it was not till the
sixteenth century that it wholly lost its prim-
itive character. The use of the French lan-
guage by ecclesiastics in the churches was
doubtless simultaneous with its employment
in legend and romance, as it was the only
mode by which they could make themselves
intelligible to the people; but the vulgar
tongue found little favor with the clergy,
and there are in consequence but few exam-
ples remaining of sermons in the early
French. Sermons were probably composed
in Latin, and translated into the vernacular
dialect; but if they were preserved, it was
usually in the Latin language.
pears from the sermons of St. Bernard, of

This ap

ings of a feudal aristocracy, and they serve to illustrate a remarkable revolution in society. It is in these works that may be detected the first gems of modern thought and feeling, and of influences which in some measure are still felt.

The first portion of M. Moland's essay is devoted to an examination of the Romance of Saint Graal and the Round Table. His view is that, though in its present shape it

which a manuscript in French is extant. claimed. They are the work of a peculiar
There is little reason to doubt that they must class; they describe the manners and feel-
have been composed in Latin and afterwards
translated. It was not till a much later age
that French became the usual language of
ecclesiastics. They were necessarily obliged
to preserve a knowledge of Latin, and it
was one of the many obstacles to the dif-
fusion of learning that the only class which
possessed any cultivation wrote, and fre-
quently spoke, a language which had been
gradually supplanted among the people by
the new dialects. The formation of the new unquestionably belongs to the twelfth cen-
languages in Italy, France, and Spain was a
slow and laborious process. It took a long
time for them to acquire the accuracy and
refinement necessary for a written language.
The clergy were using a foreign tongue which
in their hands had lost all its beauty and
power, and it followed that, though they
were by no means illiterate during what are
called the dark ages, they produced little
that possessed either vigor or originality.
The people, on the other hand, spoke lan-
guages that were in a state of transition, and
which were only reduced into form when the
learned ecclesiastics at length condescended
to make use of them. There is, it is be-
lieved, little French writing extant which
can be shown to be earlier than the eleventh
century, though no doubt the langurge was
extensively employed in songs and in poetry.
A hundred years later, about the time of the
First Crusade, French and Provençal were
distinct languages, wanting neither in refine-
ment nor flexibility. It was the age of song
and metrical romances, and marks an im-
portant step in the progress of European

civilization.

To this period also belong the earliest prose romances. They have, perhaps, received less attention than the poetry of the same age, though not less deserving of consideration for the light which they throw on the formation of the French language as well as for their bearing on the intellectual history of those times. Besides this, the prose romances are of colossal bulk, and have been for the most part known only through the very imperfect reprints of the sixteenth century. But, in M. Moland's view, they form an exact counterpart to the metrical romances and Chansons de Geste of the same period. The former were intended to be read the latter to be recited or de

tury, it was then only a reproduction, in a new form, of a work which was already of some antiquity. The basis of it he conceives may have been furnished by some of the numerous legends which were carried from Asia to the western nations of Europe, and which were mixed up with the history of their conversion to Christianity, and in its earliest form it had the character of a spir itual allegory. In those parts of the cycle which appear to be most ancient, an exclusively theological idea and a religious purpose are apparent. At the beginning of the period of chivalry, that institution was sacerdotal and monastic in spirit. The Church only looked upon it as a religious institution and a military priesthood. To quote M. Moland :

"It cannot be contested that about the eleventh century the Latin Book of Saint Graal was designed to trace out the chival rous ideal which, at the same date, it was sought to realize in the Order of the Temple. It laid down, so to speak, the terms of the union of austerity with heroism, of bravery with faith. It proposed the purity and chastity of the priest for the knightly warrior, and endeavored to extend to the army of soldiers the same reform which Gregory VII. had imposed upon the priesthood.

"We believe that this was the spirit and the Norman compilers designate the vielle design of the work written in Latin which histoire and the haute histoire. In some portions of the French cycle, especially in the Romance of Saint Graal, it is clear from the evidence of the translation that the romance writers of the twelfth century fol lowed the original to which they refer with ceived by the monastic spirit was not destolerable fidelity. But the severe ideal contined to triumph. The passion for adventure, for dangerous enterprises, for brilliant feats of arms, increased steadily. Chivalry