honesty, and feeling an interest you ought not to have in a guilty woman, merely because she is for ever talking about her "soul," her "aspirations,” and her "solitude upon earth." Not one whit of this. You are not "taken in" by Madame Bovary. Her first longings are material, and as narrowly material as they well can be. She longs for superior ease and comfort, for a vehicle of some sort to drive about in, for thicker curtains to her windows, softer cushions to her chairs, more delicate viands on her table, braver gear upon her back. She sighs for what Bulwer terms the "lovely whereabouts of woman," because she feels that, in her social centre, these make the woman herself. If her husband had money enough, she would not dream of straying from the right road, but would do her duty to him and to herself, that is, to her own comfort in the world, by which she would stand to the death. But the luckless Bovary has no money, and Madame Emma, his fair spouse, must and will have what money alone can command. She therefore sets to work to trade and traffic with a linen-draper and haberdasher of the village, who, by means of bills which she signs, (having her husband's proxy for the transaction of all money matters,) and the entire mortgage of a bit of ground and the dwelling-house upon it, consents to furnish her with the articles she successively deems indispensable to her terrestrial felicity.

Nothing (alas!) can be truer to the life, or more cleverly painted, than all this earlier part of Madame Bovary's career, and the character of the marchand de nouveautes, who lends her money and furnishes her with goods at a usurious interest, is a portrait well worthy of Teniers or Ostade, in their own style. Nor can anything be more true to life, than the way in which the heroine begins her course of wrongdoing. She is to the very marrow the type of the calculating, hard-bargain-driving Frenchwoman of the rural classes,— the true daughter of envious, Voltairian peasants, to whom a half-education, ill directed, and a half-piety, ill nurtured, has merely given a varnish that is scratched off at the first contact of a bona fide interest or passion. All Madame Bovary's natural vices, upon their first spontaneous breaking out, are hard, not tender vices. The irregularities of are impure

sort come later, and come only because each irregularity superinduces another, and because all impurity and all wrong are one, and hold indissolubly together. Madame Bovarywho, after all her evil-doings, poisons herself to escape the shame of a sale of all she possesses, leaving her husband convinced he has lost an angel - never interests the reader for a moment; for she never interests her author. He dissects her for the benefit of the surrounding spectators, who watch the anatomical process with the curiosity of an amphitheatrefull of medical students; and as an autopsis of the Frenchwoman of the present age, of the Frenchwomen of all save the highest class, Madame Bovary, we should be tempted to say, surpasses, in her terrible truth, the most famous pictures of Sue, Balzac, or Madame Sand. She has not the deliberate wickedness of Sue's Ursule, in his celebrated novel Mathilde, nor the inborn impurity of Balzac's Femme de Trente Ans; she has nothing deliberate about her, no parti pris, but inclines to vice, because her determined quest of a luxury beyond the scope of her own immediate sphere inevitably leads her that way. But now, be it remarked, what must up to a certain point be styled the probity of the bourgeois nature survives sufficiently in Madame Bovary to prevent her from ever accepting the slightest atom of pecuniary aid from those who become the partakers in her guilt. She provides by endless calculations and combinations for the satisfaction of her desires, and ruins herself, her husband, and her child, all alone and ruthlessly, without the help of any one; nor is it till at the very last moment, when public disgrace stares her in the face, that she once (and once only) turns round to the companions of her evil courses, and says: "Lend me eight thousand francs, or I must die." No one does or can lend, and she does die; but till that hour she has never accepted or asked a pecuniary service from those even who have helped her to go the farthest astray from the paths of virtue and of right.

Since Balzac's time, no work of fiction has produced such a sensation as "Madame Bovary," nor, we unhesitatingly repeat, has any work painted so faithfully certain types of the middle classes in France. For the mere sympathies of the

reader, this is a most unpleasant book; but it is one too full of instruction not to be worth reading, and no one should neglect its perusal who is curious to form for himself a correct idea of what nine tenths of the women of France have become in the gradual development of gold-worship that has been progressing for the last fifteen years in their native country. Careless of truth, full of vanity, but still more covetous even than vain, possessed of whatever intelligence can be developed without elevation, Madame Bovary represents that peculiar type of a woman, whose aptitudes and energies, well directed, might enable her to govern an empire (and herself too), but who, from her utter insensibility to all notions of duty, falls to the lowest depth of a degradation which is, in reality, foreign to her nature. Take all the heroines of Balzac, Sue, Sand, Alexandre Dumas (fils), Hugo, and the rest, and you will find only several aspects of the same; but, as we have already observed, there are details in M. Flaubert's book which make his heroine the completest of all.

ART. IX. Brazil and the Brazilians, portrayed in Historical and Descriptive Sketches. By Rev. D. P. KIDDER, D. D., and Rev. J. C. FLETCHER. Illustrated by one hundred and fifty Engravings. Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson. 1857. 8vo. pp. 630.

WE have more than once referred to the value of the contributions to science and knowledge rendered back to their native land by our American missionaries. There are, no doubt, adequate reasons for their accuracy and affluence as sources of information. They are, for the most part, men of liberal culture; while the very purpose that makes them exiles indicates a native breadth of vision and grasp of intellect, no less than superior spiritual endowments. Such men know antecedently what to look for, and where; and in travelling, as in the most recondite departments of philosophy, one finds answers only to questions which he is prepared to ask, and VOL. LXXXV. NO. 177. 46

ascertains only such portions of truth as correspond to interrogations already shaped in his own mind. Then, too, as regards the aspects of nature, devotional sentiment adds keenness even to the perceptive faculties; and none will see so much, and describe so vividly, as he whose conversance with nature is communion with its Author. The philanthropic aim of these countrymen of ours furnishes also a clear medium of vision for whatever concerns man, his condition and his needs, and for the external universe in its relations to

man.

We are not, therefore, surprised to find in the volume before us a book of unusual merit and attractiveness. We can best characterize it by saying that it furnishes precisely the picture of Brazil and the Brazilians which we should demand for actual use, were we about to establish our residence in that empire, or were we devising modes of beneficent action, educational, moral, or religious, upon its inhabitants. It comprises a large amount of statistics, as regards the fauna and the flora, industry and traffic, government and society; but, instead of being given in their crude form, they are presented incidentally, each item in the connection in which we can best trace its significance. It contains also a compend of Brazilian history, not mere annals, or arid lists of names and dates, or disjointed facts; it shows the filaments of past events as they are blended and interwoven in the nation's present, and are giving shape and color to its future.

The authors were admirably well adapted and furnished for their work. They both resided many years in Brazil, were constantly engaged in professional duty, and made numerous missionary journeys into remote provinces, seldom penetrated by naturalists, and as yet unvisited for the purposes of commerce. Mr. Fletcher, as acting Secretary of Legation for the United States, was also brought into intimate relations with the officers of government, and enjoyed the friendly regard of the Emperor, whose portrait is the attractive frontispiece of the volume, and whose intelligence, energy, and devotion to the public weal merit for him a rank second to no sovereign of the age, and the first place among the benefactors of his native land. The work has the fulness

and the confirmed accuracy, without the confusion and repetitiousness, of a double authorship. Dr. Kidder placed all his materials at the command of his junior colleague, who writes in the first person, for the most part recasting the observations of both in his own continuous narrative, though sometimes inserting, without change, portions of the manuscripts of his senior. Mr. Fletcher's style is pure and perspicuous, fresh and fluent, flexible with the diversity of subject and occasion, eminently graphic and picturesque, and adapted to hold the attention and command the unflagging interest of the reader.

Accustomed as we are to dwell with pride on the vast and varied capacities of our own "great country," we are hardly aware that there exists on our continent an empire which con tains within itself the elements, already in hopeful development, of a higher and more imposing status than ours among the nations of the earth. Yet so it is. Brazil not only, in its superficial dimensions, exceeds the United States by one third, but it is larger than the whole of Europe. Its mineral treasures are paltry, when compared with the unbounded capabilities of its teeming soil. With no extended desert and no blighting sirocco, undisturbed by the earthquakes which perpetually threaten other South American kingdoms, irrigated by unfailing streams, fertilized in all its borders by copious and timely rains, adapted to the culture of almost every product both of the temperate and torrid zone, it demands only occupancy by a free, industrious, and enterprising people to govern the markets and sway the commerce of the world. Its numerous rivers, many of them reaching the ocean by a descent of several hundred feet, have a potential water power which might carry all the looms and spindles in existence, and still run to waste. The Amazon and its branches, several of the largest affluents of the La Plata, and not a few other navigable streams, offer unparalleled facilities for mercantile intercourse, and furnish accessible and safe harbors far up in the interior for such vessels as are elsewhere confined to the ocean and its ports. The climate is temperate and invigorating. The trade winds sweep the whole Atlantic coast with their grateful burden of humidity, their per