had valves. He saw that they were turned towards the heart. It may seem strange that Fabrice should not have seen in this discovery the anatomical proof of circulation; for if the valves prevent the blood coming from the heart, and allow it to pass to the heart, the old doctrine of the veins being the carriers of blood to the tissues is upset. Fabrice saw the fact; the significance of the fact was seen by Harvey, and by him alone.*

And now the final step was to be taken; a man of genius came to put an end to these arduous and fluctuating tentatives, and to reveal the mystery which for seventeen centuries had baffled the wisest. In 1619, William Harvey publicly taught the doctrine which, with slight modifications, has been taught ever since; and in 1628 he published his treatise, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis, which forms the basis of modern physiology. The history of previous attempts, and the exposition of the state of the doctrine when Harvey appeared, give a profounder impression of the magnitude of his discovery and the genius it required, although they enable us to trace how that discovery was prepared; they show what was the confluence of ideas which made the discovery possible then, and they show the force of mind needed before advantage could be taken of such confluence: they give to the Hour and to the Man respective shares. A little earlier the discovery would have been impossible; a little later it would assuredly have been made by some one else. Before the valves in the veins had been discovered, the idea of circulation would always have been rejected as absurd; but the importance of these valves would not have been perceived, had not the old error of a perforated septum been removed; and thus we remount from Harvey to Acquapendente, from Acquapendente to Cesalpinus, Colombo and Servetus, from them to Vesalius, from Vesalius to Galen-so many landmarks on the long and weary way-so many ancestors in the parentage of a great idea.

M. Flourens, whose admiration for Harvey is unstinted, says that when Harvey appeared, tout avait été indiqué ou soupçonné; rien n'était établi. We think this less than

* M. Flourens examines at some length the claim of Paolo Sarpi to the discovery made by Harvey, and decides that there is absolutely no evidence in favor of Sarpi. To what he has said we may add the testimony of George Ent, Harvey's friend, who declares the Venetian ambassador at London witnessed Harvey's demonstration, and told Sarpi of it.

the truth. We think it can be shown in the clearest manner that no one had the slightest conception of the circulation, not even as a possible process. And yet we have shown how the discovery was prepared; we have shown that Harvey appeared at a certain juncture and confluence of time when the discovery became possible. That the idea was startling in its novelty, and would excite boundless opposition, Harvey knew: "Adeo iis nova erunt et inaudita," he says, "ut non solum ex invidia querundam metuam malum mihi, sed vereor ne habeam inimicos omnes homines, tantum consuetudo aut semel inhibita doctrina, altisque defixa radicibus, quasi altera natura apud omnes valet, et antiquitatis veneranda opinio cogit."* One proof will suffice. The last step which was taken before Harvey was taken by Harvey's master, Acquapendente. In discovering the venous valves he discovered the mechanism which permitted circulation. But we have seen that he failed to perceive its true bearing; he said, indeed, that the purpose of the valves was to prevent the accumulation of blood in the lower parts of the body! Nay, more this discovery was made in 1574; forty-five years elapsed before its real significance was appreciated, and during these five and forty years all that was known, all that was suspected touching the circulation of the blood, was known to every anatomist in Padua, if not in Europe; and it was in Padua Harvey studied. It is clear, then, that Harvey discovered what was new, what was unsuspected; and any attempt to rob him of that glory must be silenced by a decisive verdict.

A natural question arises: how did the ancients conceive the movement of the blood to take place, if circulation was an idea of which they had no suspicion? The answer is: they believed the blood to oscillate to and fro in the veins, with a sort of flux and reflux like the ebb and flow of the tides. The discovery of a circulus-that all the blood flowed from the heart through the arteries, and returned back again to the heart through the veinschanged the whole aspect of physiology. Harvey left, however, much to be done by successors, in filling up the outline he conceived. He knew nothing, for instance, of the capillaries, those minute, delicate vessels which form the termination of arteries and the commencement of veins-channels by which arterial blood is conveyed into the veins. He knew that the blood did pass

from artery to vein, but knew not whether it passed through the direct union of the two vessels in anastomosis, or through the porosities of the flesh, aut porositates carnis et partium solidarum pervias sanguini. The microscope had not then revealed the capillaries-which we call hair like vessels, although hairs are thick as cables in comparison with vessels invisible to the naked eye. They were not seen till 1688, by Leeuwenhoek.

The opposition with which Harvey's discovery was met, has become a stereotyed theme of declamation, but it is less generally known that Harvey himself opposed to the last the important discoveries of the lacteals and lymphatics, vessels which are absolutely necessary to complete his own theory; a fact which helps us to understand the opposition raised by scientific men to discoveries they have not made, and to doctrines they have not been taught. G. H. L.

WHILE M. Alexander Dumas was enjoying the triumphs of his experimental venture in dramatic art, in the success of Christine" and "Henri III.," M. de Cassagnac was at school at Toulouse, and there, with prodigious interest, followed with his mind's eye the movements of this new literary emprise, which crossed and defied the prepossessions of France's youth, and the traditions of her hoary eld. He likens it to a torrent in its swift and sweeping power, and himself as sitting, like Virgil's shepherd-swain, on the banks of the tumultuous waters, watching, as they whirled and eddied adown the stream, now a Delille, now a Parny-here a La Harpe, there a J. B. Rousseau,-anon a St. Lambert, and next a Voltaire. "I was not," he tells us, "sufficiently acquainted with the great masters to understand that the new ideas, which were thus ringing out the works of the eighteenth century, would at the same time ring in those of the seventeenth. When I saw Voltaire falling, I had my fears for Corneille; and I set myself to study this new literature, so imperious and so aggressive, just as one studies the plague." The results of that study have been given to the world in various articles, more than sufficiently damaging to Racine and his school, and offensive to their partisans, who have cried Havoc at sight of their foeman's ravages, and let slip their dogs of war.

Euvres littéraires de Granier de Cassagnac : "Portraits littéraires." Paris: Lecou.

This kind of sport he rather enjoys than otherwise. He has plenty of self-assurance, has M. Granier de Cassagnac, and is not to be put pown by baying and barking extraordinary. He only charges his piece with paradoxes of heavier metal, and fires with an air of more telling execution. Really, he is sorry to disturb the temper and the afternoon-of-life repose of France's conservative critics, her very worthy and approved good masters, all correct, classical and conventional, by bis innovating notions and juvenile extravagances; but he is conscientious, and they must bear with him; he can argue as well as assert; he can unfold a series of reasons, as well as move a series of resolutions; he only begs them to govern their temper, and to answer him if they can. "They have passed the age," says he, “at which men study and discuss; and I am at that when truth is the object of pursuit ; they are taking their rest, and I am working, that in due time I may take my rest also. I am doing what they are no longer doing, but what once they too have done; they have found, and I am yet seeking." Elsewhere he says, "The studies I put forth on Racine are not designed to depreciate the classical to the gain of the romantic school; they are but the result of a very free but very sincere, a very decided but equally conscientious examination of an entire class of works, upon which the received judgment was passed under the Regency, that is to say, at an epoch when literary taste in France

was of the falsest kind; they express the opinion of a serious writer upon poems which everybody admires and nobody reads." How comes it, is he asked, that where others affirm, he denies that where they subscribe, he protests? Does he believe himself wiser, better instructed, more reasonable, than every one else? Certainly not. Only, there needs not to have better eyes than another, simply to see what he is not looking at." His judicial opponents he considers disqualified for judicial authority, by this very sort of judicial blindness. The age makes a great fuss about being original, and independent, and not taking things on trust; but nothing, in his opinion, is so common as a blind assent to vulgar creeds, be they even the vulgarest of vulgar errors.

The columns of the Presse and the Constitutionnel, to say nothing of the small arms of a score of "petits journaux," opened fire on M. de Cassagnac, for his treasonable attempt on Racine. It was no less than lèse-majesté, his audacious assault on the person of King John. And, by-the-bye, a capital point in the capital crime was, the calling his majesty by his Christian name, John. M. de Cassagnac called John over the coals, as coolly as a Russell square cit would his John, for sins of omission at the dinnertable, or of commission in the cellar. M. de Cassagnac accused John of bad grammar, bad rhymes, and other bad qualities; and if he did not tell John he ought to have known better, why, he told John's worshippers that they ought. Great was the wrath excited by this piece of familiarity. But even this wrath M. de Cassagnac turned against his assailants, to his own advantage and their confusion. "Many persons," quoth he, "have discovered a culpable degree of disrespect in the name of Jean, given by me to Racine. Let me be allowed to answer, that I am not nearly so disrespectful as my faultfinders are ignorant. It was Voltaire who, in a prodigious fit of reckless admiration, gave Racine the name of Jean. I have only repeated the word, taking care to underline it, to imply that it was a quotation."

But does M. de Cassagnac actually disavow all homage to King John? Does he recognize no merit in the literary dynasty of the eighteenth century? Has he no good word to say for such authors as Fontenelle, and the elder Crébillon, and Marmontel, and La Harpe-no enjoyment in reading the prose of Fénélon, the poetry of Voltaire? On the contrary, he conjures his readers at starting to take his word of honor that he is

no Attila, intent on wasting and devastating his country's literature; that he never regarded Racine as a polisson-quite the reverse; and that he sees in the French literature of the seventeenth century one of the finest spectacles that can possibly delight an intelligent mind. "Bossuet seems to me a man of distinguished taste; Corneille I have always considered the author aux plus nobles allures in our language; there are few things I prefer to the style of Madame de Sevigné; and much sooner would I have written one scene of the Fourberies de Scapin,' or some thirty lines of the Femmes savantes,' than have won the battle of Arbela or that of Marathon." "I read," he adds, as often as ever I can, the prose and verse of Molière, and I read at no time and on no account a single hemistich of M. Casimir Delavigne, or a single couplet of M. Beranger." Voila his profession of faith.

66

Nevertheless, Racine is sadly mauled by him, first and last. Racine is argued to have been behind his age in science and thought. His "Athalie," for a century pronounced in journal and playbill "chef d'œuvre inimitable," is subjected to a jealous scrutiny; in setting about which, M. de Cassagnac prays the public-however strange, bold and rash it may seem in him to cross a national panegyric so constant and unanimous-to believe, notwithstanding, that while he thus sets himself to oppose it, without a moment's hesitation, he does so from no personal vanity, but from staunch literary convictions. The faults he finds with "Athalie" are not drawn from the violation of certain rules, imposed by the criticism of a later school; he accepts the piece on the principles of its own type of art; he is not offended by Racine's employment of nurses, confidants, and palaces open at all hours to all comers; nor does he censure in "Athalie" anything which, either in the material fabric of the drama, or the agency of its persona, or the historical data of its action, might transgress the rules at present regnant in dramatic art. But he does complain that, in the first place the scenario of this tragedy is conceived and arranged with such an entire absence of all reflection, that the performance of the piece, taken literally, is a thing impossible--the locale of the first four acts being irreconcilable with that of the fifth. "The serious oversights with which Racine is chargeable, in respect to the Temple at Jerusalem, are not the less strange, when we reflect that the author of a professedly Biblical tragedy ought to have been a reader of the Bible,

in

in

where the Temple is as accurately described as in the plans of an architect.' Then, as to his personages: it is observable how frequently the word "priest" (prêtre) recurs "Athalie:"-well; with Racine this word priest just signifies curé--in accordance with the spirit in which he turns the Jewish temple into a kind of Christian church, Mathan into a verger, and Joas into a boy-chorister. But it is on the ground of style that an examination of "Athalie" must be placed, in order to be just; and upon this ground, therefore, M. de Cassagnac enters at length and in detail. With regard to style, Racine, he observes, belongs to a school of which he is not the chief, for it begins with Christine de Pisan prose, and with Malherbe in verse; a school which, speaking generally, is formed on the study and imitation of the ancients, and, among the ancients, of the Romans rather than the Greeks, and, among the Romans again, of the rhetoricians and pleaders rather than the writers of simplicity and strength. "Strange! that although Racine habitually copies the Greeks, he always Latinizes in his style. The simpliplicity of the Attic iambus charms him less than the composed gravity of the Latin hexameter." Now, when Racine's style is at its best, there is no denying to it, our critic owns, a very noble and imposing effect; marked by no great energy, indeed, for it is too diffuse and long-drawn-out for that-nor, again, very highly colored-but by a beautiful harmony and balancing of phrase. But when that style is of so-so execution, it is really, he objects, "something particularly detestable." The weakened woof breaks asunder under the stress of burdensome epithets; the idea, lost in the labyrinth of words, can hardly ever reach the termination of the phrase; and the harmony of the verse is merely an insufferable dangling of idle terms, parasitical hemistiches, and bad rhymes. And so we get "slab for plenty, plethora for fulness, and tinsel for splendor." Such, in the main, contends M. de Cassagnac, is the verse of "Athalie :" with the exception of some fine tirades, it is a lamentable heap of useless epithets and broken metaphors. "It is the style of Voltaire anticipated; for we may call the tragedies of Voltaire a completed and enlarged edition of the faults of Racine." The choruses, so universally and uninquiringly admired, are an "inconceivable lumber of vulgar and hollow expressions," such as no birth-day ode manufacturer of to-day would put his name to. Above all, Racine is convicted of sins against --grammar! "Racine, one of the creators

66

To those who accuse M. de Cassagnac of a restless obtrusion of paradox and novelty, in thus confronting the time-honored verdict of France on its favorite poet, he answers by the way, that after all he is giving expression less to his own judgment than to that of the seventeenth century entire. For, as most people are aware, when this same "Athalie" was first acted, in 1691, it was unanimously pronounced a mediocre production, by no means up to" the reputation of its author. And yet, among its judges were names which are still accepted as authorities; these were men like Labruyère, La Fontaine, Boileau, and women like Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Maintenon, without reckoning all the court of Versailles, a very world of men of wit and taste, and without reckoning Louis XIV., that great writer in an age of great writers, as may be seen from his correspondence on the subject of the succession of Charles II." So that, if "Athalie" has subsequently been lauded to the skies, and if La Harpe has cancelled the decree of Madame de Sévigné, the question turns on a choice between authorities; and M. de Cassagnac declines to consider his offence as a hanging matter, when he can hale in, as particeps criminis, every big wig, male or female, which diffused ambrosial glories throughout the palmy state of France.

In one of his essays, M. de Cassagnac