"'I heard that she married M. Ernest, whose other name I never knew, and that he became a general, and she a very great lady."
"'And Captain Tonino? Did you hear nothing more of him?'
"'Three years afterwards he came to the theatre in disguise; was recognised, arrested, and hung.'
"'And thus it was, sir,' concluded M. Louet, 'that a thrush led me into Italy, and caused me to pass twenty years at Rome.'"
And so ends the thrush-hunt. One word at parting, to qualify any too sweeping commendation we may have bestowed on M. Dumas in the early part of this paper. While we fully exonerate his writings from the charge of grossness, and recognise the absence of those immoral and pernicious tendencies which disfigure the works of many gifted French writers of the day, we would yet gladly see him abstain from the somewhat too Decameronian incidents and narratives with which he occasionally varies his pages. That he is quite independent of such meretricious aids, is rendered evident by his entire avoidance of them in some of his books, which are not on that account a whit the less _piquant_. With this single reservation, we should hail with pleasure the appearance on our side the Channel of a few such sprightly and amusing writers as Alexander Dumas.
[5] _George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, with Memoirs and Notes_. By T.H. Jesse. 4 vols.
The volumes of which we are about to give fragments and anecdotes, contain a portion of the letters addressed to a man of witty memory, whose existence was passed almost exclusively among men and women of rank; his life, in the most expressive sense of the word, West End; and even in that West End, his chief haunt St James's Street. Parliament and the Clubs divided his day, and often his night. The brilliant roués, the steady gamesters, the borough venders, and the lordly ex-members of ex-cabinets, were the only population of whose living and breathing he suffered himself to have any cognizance. In reverse of Gray's learned mouse, eating its way through the folios of an ancient library--and to whom
"A river or a sea was but a dish of tea, And a kingdom bread and butter,"
to George Selwyn, the world and all that it inhabits, were concentrated in Charles Fox, William Pitt, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the circle of men of pleasantry, loose lives, and vivacious temperaments, who, with whatever diminishing lustre, revolved round them.