1830.] [ 441 ] 



FRANCE AND MILADT MORGAN. 



WE are very much tired of Lady Morgan ; and, ungallant as Miladi 

 must conceive the confession, the announcement of a volume from her 

 pen, on politics, metaphysics, theology, the art of war, and the art of 

 love, on all of which she writes en masse, and with equal skill, alarms us 

 in the most serious degree. But we are fortunately not compelled, in 

 the present instance, to the heavy task of looking for her ideas ; as a 

 correspondent in Paris has furnished us with those of the respectable 

 portion of the literary class in that capital ; with whom, we are sorry to 

 say, her republican ladyship did not mingle much ; and we can do 

 nothing more acceptable to ourselves than to leave her in his hands. 



" TO THE EDITOR. 



" MY DEAR SIR, Paris, September, 1830. 



<l If you have ever been in Paris, you must know that, in this most 

 charming of all capitals, a wet day is not death, but a much worse thing, 

 blue devils to the last degree. But, as I have nothing to do till dinner 

 but look out of the window and count the cabriolets, I shall give you 

 some notes on the " France, by Lady Morgan," which I have been turn- 

 ing over in my night-gown. 



tc In the first place I can assure you, French as I am, I have feeling 

 enough for England to regret that she should not have some law, or 

 contrivance, for her own sake, to prevent such personages as this Miladi 

 Morgan from making the name of your great country ridiculous 

 wherever she goes. The French have an unlucky habit of thinking 

 that every thing said in print in England has some sort of public 

 sanction. I have done my best to inform my friends here that Miladi 

 has no sort of sanction from the respectable and intelligent portion of 

 your people ; that she is laughed at, and utterly rejected by every thing 

 distinguished among your men of literature ; and that your ladies of 

 condition shrink from her as a frivolous, silly, and extremely presuming 

 little personage. But her own nonsense settled the question for her, 

 when she was here lately. She was the very model of f common-place 

 mediocrity, and pushing pretension' Her own works, her own wonders, 

 her own celebrity, her own persecutions, were her boast, ridiculous as the 

 very idea of such a boast must be. Her own manners, looks, and graces, 

 Heaven protect us ! were her only topics, and they were fled from in 

 all directions. 



" We set her down as the most ridiculous exhibition of pert vanity 

 and frisky decrepitude that was to be found, even in Paris, where the 

 combination is more frequent than in any other part of the known world. 

 But her society, her preux chevaliers, her men of genius, her organs of 

 public opinion, are all the most contemptible affectation. You must know 

 that we have in Paris a race of minor litterateurs with nothing on earth 

 to do but to ramble from coffee-house to coffee-house, and from coterie to 

 coterie. If their names have reached England, I am satisfied none of 

 their works have ; for, even here, they die within the week : one of 

 them pilfers some little story, or writes a copy of newspaper rhymes, or 

 translates some farce from the German, or recites some plundered essay 

 at some of our obscure lecture-rooms, and, from that time forth, he looks 

 upon himself as making a part of the literary glory of the land, 



" Those fellows swarm among us, and they are the perfect nuisance 



M.M. New Series. VOL. X. No. 58. 3 K 



