uses, perhaps half a dozen times in her twelve volumes, two or three words, which, though considered polite in her time, are now obsolete. As regards the substance, there is no unfavorable judgment of much authority, excepting that of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who pronounces the letters to be mere tittle-tattle, and the author, something between a fine lady and an old nurse. When will rival ⚫ wits and belles learn to do each other justice? Without disparagement to her Ladyship's taste and judgment, we incline to the opinion that the tittle-tattle of circles in which Condè and Corneille conversed with Louis XIV., Turenne, Bossuet, Pascal, Fenelon and Sévigné, will be thought, hereafter, at least as interesting as descriptions of Turkish manners and scenery, agreeable as these, from the elegant pen of Lady Mary, undoubtedly are.

Madame de Sévigné belonged to the noble family of Rabutin-Chautal, and was born in 1626. Her grandmother, the Baroness of Chautal, was a person of extraordinary piety. She instituted the order of Sisters of the Visitation, of which she established eighty-four convents in France. In the year 1767, she was canonized by Pope Clement XIV., as one of the saints of the Catholic church. Her son, and Madame de Sévigné's father, Baron Chautal, though essentially, as it appears, a good-natured person, seems to have practiced a singular frankness in his epistolary style, at least if we may judge from a specimen which is preserved in the letters of his daughter. On the elevation of Mr. de Schomberg to the dignity of Marshal of France, Chautal addressed him the following laconic letter:

'Monseigneur,

Qualité: Barbe noire : familiarité.

CHAUTAL.'

In this rather enigmatical despatch, the Baron is

understood to have intended to reproach his correspondent with being indebted for his promotion to his high birth, his beard, which was black like that of Louis XIII., and his personal acquaintance with the King. Baron Chautal commanded the French forces, which were stationed at the Isle of Rhé to repulse the attack of the English under the Duke of Buckingham, in 1627. On this occasion he sustained himself heroically for six hours in succession, had three horses killed under him, and received twenty-seven wounds, the last, as is said, from the hand of Oliver Cromwell, which proved fatal. His widow died in 1632, leaving their only daughter, afterward Madame de Sévigné, an orphan six years old. She owed her education chiefly to her uncle, the Abbé de Livry, of the Coulanges family, who took a paternal care of her through life, and left her his property. He lived to an advanced age, and figures constantly in the letters under the title of le bien bon.

Madamoiselle de Chautal was presented at the Court of Louis XIII., at the age of about seventeen. At this time she is described as having been remarkably handsome. She was of middling stature, with a good person, a profusion of light colored hair, an uncommonly fresh and brilliant complexion, indicating luxuriant health, a musical voice, a lively and agreeable manner, and a more than ordinary skill in the elegant accomplishments that belong to a finished education. Her cousin, the notorious Count de Bussy-Rabutin, in a sort of satirical portrait of her, written in a fit of ill-humor, amused himself at the expense of her square nose and parti-colored eye-lashes, to which she occasionally alludes herself in her letters. Bussy, however, in his better moods, does justice to her appearance, as well as character, and repeatedly pronounces her, in his letters, the handsomest woman in France. Her beauty, which seems to have depended on

good health and a happy temperament, rather than mere regularity of features, improved with age, and she retained to a very late period of life the titles of bellissima Madre, and the Mother Beauty, (mère beauté,) which were conferred upon her by her cousin Coulanges, and confirmed by the general voice of the society in which she lived. The year following her appearance at Court she married the Marquis de Sévigné, who was killed in a duel six years later, leaving her a wealthy and attractive widow of about four-and-twenty, at a Court where, as has been already remarked, licentiousness was nearly universal, and where the women of fashion passed, almost without exception, through the two periods of gallantry in early life, and ascetic devotion after the age of pleasure was over. It is no slight merit in Madame de Sévigné, considering the circumstances, that she steered clear of both these opposite excesses, and stood by general acknowledgment above suspicion. This is fairly admitted even by her enemies, or rather enemy, for her cousin Bussy was the only person who ever openly found fault with her. In order to have some apology for refusing her the credit she deserves, he ascribes her correct conduct to coldness of temperament, as if every line of her correspondence did not prove that her heart was overflowing with kindness, and that she was habitually under the influence of impulse, quite as much as of calculation. No better proof of this will be wanted, at least by the ultra-prudent generation of New England parents, than that she sacrificed a great part of her large fortune in establishing her son and daughter, and found herself, in her later years, reduced to comparatively quite narrow circumstances. It was her felicity, or rather her merit, that her affections, strong as they were, flowed in healthy and natural channels, instead of wasting themselves on forbidden objects. The evident ill-humor with

which Lady Mary Wortley Montague speaks of her and her writings, was probably owing, in part, to a consciousness of the great superiority in this respect of the character of Madame de Sévigné to her own.

The

Madame de Sévigné not only kept herself aloof from the almost universal licentiousness of her time, but steadily refused all offers of marriage, and devoted herself with exemplary assiduity to the education of her two children, a son and daughter. The latter is the person to whom the greater part of the letters are addressed. same authorities which represent the mother as the handsomest woman in France, describe the daughter as the handsomest young lady, (la plus jolie fille.) She was married at eighteen to the Count de Grignan, a nobleman of high consideration and apparently excellent character, who was called on soon after to act as governor of Provence. His lady naturally accompanied him, and the separation that took place in consequence between the mother and daughter, was the immediate cause of the correspondence, which has given them both, and particularly the former, so extensive a celebrity. After a few detached letters of an earlier date, the principal series commences with the departure of Madame de Grignan for Provence, and is kept up at very short intervals, excepting when the parties were occasionally together, sometimes for years in succession, through the whole life of Madame de Sévigné; who, at the age of seventy, died at her daughter's residence, of small pox, brought on by excessive care and fatigue in attending upon this beloved child through a severe and protracted illness of several months:- thus, finally sacrificing her life to the strong maternal love to which she had already sacrificed her fortune, and which had been the absorbing passion and principal source of happiness of all her riper years. This deeply affecting catastrophe crowns with a sort of

poetical consistency, the beautiful and touching romance of real life, which it brings to a close.

The letters, considered merely as a sketch of the private adventures of the parties, revolve round the circle of incidents, which made up, at that time, the history of every family of the same class. The son's achievements in the wars, the marriage of the daughter, her health and the birth of her children, her husband's affairs, which became embarrassed from the necessity of keeping up an immense household as governor of Provence, without any adequate allowance from the King to cover the expense; the establishment of her daughter's children,

together with the adventures of other more remote branches of the family, compose the outline of the plot, which is of course simple enough. The characters of the corresponding parties, and their immediate connections, are also, with the exception of Madame de Sévigné herself, rather common place. The son, who was placed at great expense to his mother in the army, seems to have made little or no figure, and retired early to a life of inactivity. The daughter, Madame de Grignan, in the few of her letters which are preserved, says nothing to justify the unbounded admiration with which she is constantly spoken of by her mother and the whole family circle. Count de Bussy is an original, but of an unpleasant kind; and is never entertaining, excepting when he makes himself ridiculous, which happens rather often. The Coulanges are mere votaries of fashion, and so of the rest. But the test of genius, as need hardly be said, is, propriè communia dicere, -to produce great effects with common materials, to tell the story of life, as it really passes, in a lively, original, and entertaining way. The brilliant imagination and magical pen of Madame de Sévigné threw an air of novelty over all these every-day characters and incidents, and we follow the development