FEB. 15, 1867. NEW BOOKS. ORANGE JUDD & CO., Agricultural and Rural Book Publishers, 41 PARK ROW, NEW YORK, HAVE JUST PUBLISHED PEAT AND ITS USES. By Prof. S. W. JOHNSON, of Yale College. Part I. Origin, Varieties, and Chemical Character of Peat. Part II. On the Agricultural Uses of Peat and Swamp Muck. Part III. On Peat as Fuel. QUINBY'S MYSTERIES OF BEE-KEEPING. (Entirely rewritten.) By RIVERS' MINIATURE FRUIT GARDEN. Illustrated. By THOMAS RIVERS. MY VINEYARD AT LAKEVIEW; or, Successful Grape Culture. By A WESTERN GRAPE GROWER. 12mo., 143 pp., bevelled boards, $1 25. SAUNDERS' DOMESTIC POULTRY. Revised and enlarged. By SIMON M. SAUNDERS. Fully Illustrated. 12mo., 168 pp., paper 40 cents; cloth, 75. GARDENING FOR PROFIT. A Guide to the Successful Cultivation of the Market and Family Garden. By PETER HENDERSON. Fully illustrated. Price, cloth, $1 50. THE AMERICAN HORTICULTURAL ANNUAL-1867. A Year Book of Horticultural Progress for the Professional and Amateur Gardener, Fruit Grower, and Florist. Fully illustrated. Price, fancy paper, 50 cts.; cloth, 75 cts. THE AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL ANNUAL-1867. A Hand-Book for the Present, and a Guide for the Future, for all lovers of Agricultural Progress. Fully illustrated. Price, fancy paper, 50 cts.; cloth, 75 cts. IN PREPARATION: AMERICAN POMOLOGY. Part I. APPLES. By Dr. JOHN A. WARDER. SMALL FRUIT CULTURIST. By ANDREW S. FULLER, author of "Grape All the above books will be thoroughly illustrated, and will prove standards in the various departments with which they are connected, as the authors are practical as well as scientific men, and understand the subjects which they write about. O. J. & Co. publish about one hundred books on Agricultural and Rural subjects, and will be adding to the number from time to time. LIBERAL DISCOUNTS will be made to the Trade, from whom Orders are solicited. 41 Park Row, New York. GEORGE W. CHILDS, PUBLISHER, Nos. 628 & 630 CHESTNUT STREET, PHILADELPHIA. GEO. N. DAVIS, 119 Rua Direita, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Agent for South America. A. ROMAN, San Francisco, California, Agent for the Pacific Coast. STEPHENS & CO., 10 Calle Mercaderes, Habana, Agents for the West Indies. Subscriptions or Advertisements for the “American Literary Gazette” will be received by the above Agents, and they will forwar to the Editor any Books or Publications intended for notice. MAR. 1, 1867. OUR CONTINENTAL CORRESPONDENCE. PARIS, January 18, 1867. M. VICTOR COUSIN is dead. M. Ingres is dead. M. de La Rochejaqueleir is dead. Mlle. Georges is dead. So cruel has been the last fortnight! France has lost its ablest philosopher of this century, its best painter, one of its great orators, one of its gifted actresses. All those parts are but ashes now. Who can contemplate such and so many ruins and not feel sad? The career of all the men mentioned is encouraging; even the life of the Marquis de La Rochejaqueleir, though smiled on by Fortune from the cradle, shows how a noble name may be borne so as to give it additional lustre-an example perhaps more necessary than the successful struggle of merit with poverty. Victor Cousin was the son of a petty watchmaker in the Rue St. Antoine. He was born in its back shop November 28, 1790. I obey custom in saying he was the son of this man; in justice, I should say he was the son of a petty watchmaker's wife, for he owed everything to his mother. God only knows at what expense of tears, taunts, lacerated feelings, she succeeded in wresting her husband's consent to her son's following the natural bent of his genius. Her husband was a thorough denizen of the Rue St. Antoine. He had all those kinks which made the population of that street and its continuation (Rue du Faubourg St. Antoine) so infamous during the Revolution. He was an atheist, a king hater, an adorer of the guillotine, a detester of the priesthood. Jean Jacques Rousseau was his idol. He insisted upon training his son according to this wild man's theories (who had tossed his own child to the Foundling Hospital), and declared the boy should become an artisan there being nothing nobler than a mechanic. He gave the boy the choice of the trades of optician, engraver, or watchmaker. But the boy had acquired a taste for books; he said he would follow no trade; he would learn Latin and Greek, become a professor -not an artisan. The father became exceedingly angry. The mother interfered. Humble and uneducated as that woman was, ignorant as she must have been of the enchantments and the glory of a successful literary career, her maternal acuteness saw this was the path her son ought to take. Don't say the age of miracles has passed! Maternal love doth work them daily-not in the abodes of wealth, but in the humble hut or shop of poverty. She taught her husband a lesson above them both, and wrung so much consent from him as this: The boy might do as he pleased, provided the father's purse was not levied on to aid the wild schemes. The mother remembered she had a cousin in the Church, and made application to him to receive the boy in his rustic parsonage (he was curate of a parish hard-by Mantes), and teach him the rudiments of classical learning. Dull is the monotony of these rural parsonages, where poverty interdicts the communion of the quick and the dead [whose spirits yet live in books], where none of the parishioners are ransomed by wealth from the primeval curse, where the discipline of the Church forbids all female inmates in the parsonage other than those who have reached that stage of life where sex disappears under the accumulation of years. Add, for truth's sake, the benevolent sentiments nurtured by ministration at the altar; and you may conceive the gratification given the solitary curate by the accession to his family of an intellectual boy panting after learning as other children thirst for play-time. The priest must have been repaid generously his beneficence by hearing the prattling of those great talents which were one day to attain a reputation wide as civilization. When he had imparted to the boy all he knew, he advised him to return to Paris. The curate knew the master of a boarding-school who would gladly admit him as a free pupil, in consideration of the honor which would redound to his school by the rank so gifted a lad could not fail to attain at the public examination of all the schools and colleges in Paris. There is not a boarding-school in Paris which has not one or more such talented youths, and so great has the competition for them become there are schools which give such lads a handsome premium in money annually. They are bait to attract scholars to the school. Victor Cousin was delighted with this information. He was placed in a school connected with Charlemagne College (all our pri vate schools are as it were in ward to some college, and are obliged to send the scholars to its lectures). Here he became at once the first boy among all the scholars, and this pre-eminence among his contemporaries he retained as long as he lived. He took the first honors in the general examination in 1809, honors which exempted him from the conscription and entitled him as of right to free admission in the Normal School. At this period of his life, M. Cousin's ambition was to strive as a lettered man. Philosophy had little charm for him. Accident one day threw him into Laromiguière's lecture-room. He became delighted with the subtle doctrines of this science, and studied it with singular ardorwith that ardor he brought to every subject which attracted his attention. He next heard Roger Collard's lectures on the same subject, and he threw aside Laromiguière's doctrines of the eighteenth century and became a disciple of the Scotch school. In 1812 he graduated at the Normal School, and was at once appointed deputy professor of Greek in Charlemagne College, deputy professor of Greek in the Normal School, and deputy professor of history in the Polytechnic School. His appointment in the Normal School gave him house-rent and board free, and the emoluments of all these places relieved him at the outset of his career from those chafing cares which fever and injure the brain of so many literary men at the outset of their career. They averted, too, from him that load of debt which commonly oppresses half the life of most literary men his those debts which cannot be avoided during the barren period of literary apprenticeship, and which with their accumulations of interest devour the earnings of life's meridian days. Three years after he graduated at the Normal School Roger Collard (being elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies) made him his deputy at the Sorbonne. Roger Collard was Professor of Philosophy in the Sarbonne. He at once made a profound impression. His lec ture-room was constantly crowded. After lecturing two years he became animated with a desire to go to Germany, and study in their own home the great German philosophers. He was accused, upon return to France, of being guilty of plagiarism. Impartial judges acquit him of the charge. Even Hegel said: "Cousin caught some small fishes in my pond, but he drowned them in his own sauce." Soon after his return from Germany the influence of the Jesuits succeeded in closing the Normal School, and in superseding Messrs. Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain's lectures in the Sorbonne. At this period M. Cousin's life seemed to be near its end. He had always looked consumptive; he now began to spit blood, lost his voice, and coughed incessantly. Laennec restored him to health. As soon as he recovered health again, he translated Proclus. The Duchess de Montebello (Lannes's widow) offered him the place of tutor to her children. He accepted it, and continued to T MAR. 1, 1867. fill it until, travelling in Germany with them, he tion to philosophy, to maintain commerce with his was arrested at Dresden as a member of the secret disciples, to overlook his school, and to publish with revolutionary society, the Carbonari, thrown into care his old works, he turned almost abruptly to gaol, and instantly transferred to Berlin, where he literature. He was a man of ardent mind, lively, remained for some months. Soon after he returned nay, uneasy imagination (I one day defined him "a to Paris he began to labor on the great work of his hare with eagle eye"); once upon a scent he threw life, the translation of Plato. M. Sainte-Beuve himself on it, and never quitted it until he had exsays: "His motto and his aim were 'One monument hausted it. Some circumstance having led him to and many episodes.' He has certainly left many examine the text of "Pascal's Thoughts," he perepisodes: he looked upon his translation of Plato ceived there were marked differences between the as his monument. Did he succeed in making it as printed text and the original manuscript. He made complete and as perfect as possible? He never gave it the object of a memoir, which was really a the second edition, which would have been his last denunciation, addressed to the French Academy word." He published the first volume of this work (1843); he set the substance on fire by the zeal and in 1825; the thirteenth and last was issued in 1840. animation he brought to it. This was a characterHe gave, in 1826, a complete edition of Descartes's istic of that active and rapid nature in everything. works. His next publications were "Philosophical It could do nothing quietly, calmly, in the terms of Fragments;" Lectures on the History of Philos- a moderation appropriate and proportioned with the ophy," and "New Philosophical Fragments." In subject. He did nothing like anybody else. There 1828 the wiser counsels of M. de Martignac reopened was a dash of the conquerer in him; he added the Sarbonne and the Normal School, and M. Cou- pomp and brilliancy to everything he did. He one sin-now wearing the martyr's palm-became one day said: ""Tis true, I do like to make a noise." of the most popular men in France. Two years This discovery of the discrepancies which existed afterwards the Revolution of 1830 occurred, and for between the received printed text and the original eighteen years M. Cousin was a favorite of fortune. manuscript of "Pascal's Thoughts," lead to a proHe was Director of the Normal School, Councillor of testation from M. Leon Faugère, who claimed to be State, Peer of France, Officer, and afterwards Com- the discoverer of them, and insisted that M. Cousin mander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Royal borrowed his discovery and appropriated it to himCouncil of Public Instruction, and (during M. self. The Revolution of 1848 surprised M. Cousin, Thiers's brief ministry in 1840) Minister of Public and for some time quite depressed him. At the Instruction. He visited Switzerland, Holland, Sax- request of Gen. Cavaignac he became one of the ony, Prussia, and Austria, at the expense of the Committee of the Academy of Moral and Political government, to investigate their systems of public Sciences, which undertook to combat, by popular instruction, and his reports on them are still re- tracts, the wild theories of the Red Republicans. printed. He was, during the same period of time, When society seemed saved from peril, he published elected a member of the French Academy, and a his work on the " Beautiful, True, and Good," and member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sci- collected his more important speeches and pubences. I do not mention these rewards in a depre- lished them, with an able introduction, under the catory humor. They were deserved. He has given title of "A Defence of the Principles of the French additional lustre to the French name. He increased Revolution." He then turned his attention to the French influence in his day. He contributed works reign of Louis XIV., and became fired with his usual to the literature of his country. Should not such heat for the distinguished ladies of that period of labors be rewarded as well as those of butchers in time. He literally revived them in his mind. He gaudy livery, whose chief merit often consists in collected their portraits and every relic of them, and hurling mercilessly their fellow creatures to de- lived in their society as completely as if they had struction? An author's merits are not vicarious; been his contemporaries. This zeal for those dim a general's are rarely otherwise. It has been al- and half-forgotten personages of the past produced leged, and, I believe, with truth, M. Cousin milita- a good deal of merriment at first. You will even ted against the progress of philosophical inquiry in find a trace of the smiles it raised here in the cataFrance. He was intolerant of all opinion which logue of Messrs. D. Appleton & Co., where you may differed from his own. He treated men who differed read his "Biography of the Duchess de Longueville," from him as inquisitors treated heretics; he denied styled "Cousin's Only Romance." If this qualifithem food and shelter, at least university food and cation was intended as a bit of quiet irony, it would university shelter. There was no such thing as the have been deemed here then a good hit. spirit of free inquiry allowed during his domina- M. Cousin prosecuted his researches into that intion. He drove M. Taine out of his chair, and other teresting epoch of French history, brought to light instances of his intolerance could be cited. Ty- unpublished documents, collated the manuscripts ranny is hateful in all men; in a philosopher it is of the authors of that reign with the current ediunpardonable as well as hateful. I ought to men- tions of their works, improved his style with every tion, while glancing at the defects of this extraor- book he wrote and with every edition he issued, dinary man, that M. Pierre Leroux charged him, in until all judges confessed he had attained the style a pamphlet, with grave alterations of one of Jouf- of the best authors of the 17th century, merriment froy's posthumous works, which the latter's family abated. Merriment was at first raised by M. Sainteintrusted to him to publish. During these halcyon Beuve. He looked upon the reign of Louis XIV. as days of his life he brought out the unpublished in some measure his domain. To write his "Hisworks of Abailard; "A Treatise on Aristotle's Metaphysics;" "Philosophical Fragments" (Scholastic Philosophy); "Lectures on Kant;" "An Introduction to the Philosophical Works of Father André ;' .99.66 Literary Fragments;" "Life of Jacqueline Pascal;""Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy;" a translation of "Tenneman's Manual of Philosophy;" and he edited the philosophical works of Maine de Biran. In 1840, nearly the middle of this period of eighteen years, he divided his affections. M. Sainte-Beuve says: "While continuing to pay atten But as tory of Port Royal," he had, as he believed (not * * MAR. 1. 1867. threw a poisoned dart at M. Cousin whenever he writer. * Chaire means cathedra; chair means flesh. The quibble cannot be rendered in English. began to talk almost as we used to do, to discuss, Sur les airs les plus connus en Béarn" (Toulouse, pub. by Privat); J. Flachat's "Notes sur le fleuve du Darien, |