Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/113

104 and watch through the livelong day, now pacing fiercely in their old resorts, now haunting the post-office with inquiries for letters, till that edifice began to think her a troubled spirit, and now she would prostrate herself in that wide forest, in its dreary solitude, and call upon his name in her uncontrolled anguish, and cry cot for him to come back to her. But he never came: he was only proving himself another of those faithless cavaliers, celebrated in the song of the "Baron of Mowbray," who love and ride away.

And that was all Lavinia Glynn's requital for her insane worship. Very bitter, no doubt, bat very natural.

We shall soon come to the lunatic asylum and Maria Remar. I had thought to get all the history into one paper, but it has lengthened itself out. It's no fault of mine; and patience, dear reader, is wholesome for us both.

M. Alexandre 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.

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 down 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