which is growing upon the French nation—a taste vehemently but vainly reprobated by their critics. You see evidence of it in every thing: in their paintings; in the engravings which fill their print-shops; in their songs, their spectacles, and their works of fiction. For several years it has been making its advances without exciting the jealousy of the critics; its advances being apparently confined to the lower regions of literature and the arts. The circulating libraries have been filled with translations of English and German romances, and tales of ghosts and robbers, and the theatres of the Boulevards occupied by representations of melo-dramas. Still the higher regions of literature remained unaffected, and the national theatre retained its classic stateliness and severity. The critics consoled themselves with the idea that the romances were only read by women and children, and the melo-dramas admired by the ignorant and vulgar. But the children have grown up to be men and women; and the tinge given to their imaginations in early life is now to have an effect on the forthcoming literature of the country. As yet, they depend for their romantic aliment upon the literature of other nations, especially the English and Germans; and it is astonishing with what promptness the Scottish novels, notwithstanding their dialects, are translated into French, and how universally and eagerly they are sought after.
In poetry, Lord Byron is the vogue: his verses are translated into a kind of stilted prose, and devoured with ecstasy, they are si sombre! His likeness is in every print-shop. The Parisians envelop him with melancholy and mystery, and believe him to be the hero of his own poems, or something of the vampyre order. A French poem has lately appeared in imitation of him,[1] the author of which has caught, in a great degree, his glowing style, and deep and troubled emotions. The great success of this production insures an inundation of the same kind of poetry from inferior hands. In a little while we shall see the petty poets of France, like those of England, affecting to be moody and melancholy, each wrapping himself in a little mantle of mystery and misanthropy, vaguely accusing himself of heinous crimes, and affecting to despise the world.
- ↑ The Missennienes.
