The little plot of ground, not less than 18 ft. square, which we claim between the house and the road, should always be laid out for flowers; and it is far better to leave it to the cottager's own taste than to call in the patronizing head-gardener. Though the uneducated can seldom express the pleasure they feel in flowers, yet practically they do delight in cultivating what is within their power, and the presence of these flowers growing beside their paths and homes insensibly reacts upon them for good. A lawn with shrubberies and geometrical borders of greenhouse plants before a group of cottages, such as is sometimes seen in the neighbourhood of a great house, is offensive in its unreality, and insulting to the liberty of the tenant. You see at a glance that the show is kept up from the Hall. Each cottage should have its own to time introduced by the students of the several schools into the literature and practice of architecture in cities and mansions-continued by tradition and rule of thumb in uninterrupted use in the rural districts of England, imperatively decides the question of what is our National style, and so settles one point in the vexed controversy of the new Public Offices. Whether Palladian architecture can be said to have supplanted and successfully to have superseded the older English style in more important buildings may be yet a matter of dispute; but in this nineteenth century it would be scarcely less absurd to build in the style of the sixteenth than in that of the fourteenth century. What we want is a style thoroughly capable of using consistently all the inventions, and of meeting all the requirements, of our own age; but this cannot be invented for the nonce, but must, like every fabric of ours, social or political, be based on the experience of the past. Is then Italian or English architecture the best basis on which to found and to develop! The failures in both grounds have hitherto been lamentably equal. Still no one can doubt in which of the two schools in the present day the life and energy of art is most apparent. We must explode the fallacy that Gothic is only suited to ecclesiastical architecture, for were not the town-halls, exchanges, hospitals, as well as the castles and manor-houses of the middle ages as good in their way as the churches themselves! Religion has always claimed the first fruits of good art, and the success of the Gothic revival in church architecture, in the first instance, may be one sign of its truth. Mr. Scott's particular plan for the Foreign and Indian Offices may or may not be what the nation requires, but he is at least the English architect who has the highest European reputation to sustain; and if he has in any particular failed to satisfy the wants of the public service, it must be from other causes than want of capability of development and adaptation in the style which he has chosen. At any rate we trust that the House of Commons will not allow personal prejudice or intrigue to mar the best prospect we have had for a long time of seeing a public building arise worthy of the expectations of the country, nor-what has been too often the history of great architectural works-set aside the claims of acknowledged talent at the instigation of professional jealousy, which seems, more in this than in any other art, to stimulate the bitterness of inferior minds. front garden divided by a hedge or by pales and rails of old fashion; not of so-called rustic work composed of sapling oak branches or soft fir-tops, which soon become the shabbiest of all fences. The window-plants may be of the tenderer sorts, but for the garden itself nothing can be better than the hollyhock, the sunflower, gilliflowers in all their variety of stocks, walls, and pinks,--sweetwilliams, London pride, and bachelor's buttons, with daisy borders to the beds, and bushes of rosemary and old-man for the wedding or funeral posy. The beehive should stand near the house in the angle furthest from the door. Woodbine and China roses should cluster up the porch, and the vine and the apricot may sun themselves on the south wall; but ivy is only a fit mantle for ruins. The cultivation of pot-herbs should be encouraged, and the goodwife taught how to use them in savoury messes for her husband's supper. The vegetable garden, standard fruit-trees, and potato ground should be behind the house, and if the whole allotment can be placed here, it is of double value to the occupier. This is the secret of making the cottage pay. If a quarter or a third of an acre, never more than half, be attached to each dwelling, the landlord, by the difference of garden over farm rent, may obtain a fair return for his outlay. But this can only be done generally by the large landholders; by them, easily. The furniture of the cottage has quite kept pace with the greatly increased luxury of every higher class of house. It is pleasant to with beechen chairs and oak tables, with see how quickly a well-built cottage is filled pictured tea-tray and the bright fire-irons hung up for ornaments. One of Sam Slick's clocks, with a formidable view of the Capitol, now generally replaces its long-cased ancient cousin that ticked behind the door. It is impossible always to admire the colours and patterns of the cottage paper; neither do we, in every case, approve those in the drawing rooms of our fastidious friends. The modern style of the Potteries, which blotches out rather by colour than by form primæval shepherdesses and melodramatic sailors for the mantel-piece, is at the lowest ebb of cheap art; but the miserable daubs of pictures, religious and secular, which a few years ago covered our cottage walls with bleeding hearts and poacher-martyrs, are now, by the aid of the book-hawker, giving way to coloured prints of real excellence both in subject and execution, mixed with which, some specimens of itinerant photography are not uncommon even in remote districts. The improved fittings of our cottages is one of the signs of the times. He who has furnished his house well has given a pledge to his landlord and to the state. He will shun county courts and socialist theories. Hitherto it is chiefly the large proprietors by whom any adequate exertions have been made to increase or improve the cottage property of their estates; but several local associations have been successfully formed on the general ground of public benefit. In striking contrast to the unremunerative outlay of the metropolitan associations, are the returns made by the Hastings Cottage Improvement Society. Its five half-yearly reports should be consulted by all proposing to carry out a like benevolent object. Their system is, not to build new cottages, but to buy up old ones and improve them. The remarkable features in their scheme are the small sums spent on repairs and on law expenses. Beginning with a capital of 850l., which is now increased to 6750l., they have regularly paid interest at the rate of 67. per cent., and have now a reserved fund of 1207. Such shares as these would naturally be at a premium; but by the rules of the society, the premiums accrue to the reserve fund, though in other respects the whole business is conducted on ordinary commercial principles. A Benevolent Fund has been set on foot for the occasional assistance of sick, poor, or unemployed tenants, but its sphere is perfectly distinct from the working of the society. There are visitors, and a lending library, and a penny bank, also established in connexion with the tenantry, but not interfering with the legitimate freedom of the occupiers, or with the fair and even strict enforcement of the capitalists' rights of profit. The people generally appreciate the good-will of their landlords, and now with one exception pay weekly in advance. There are few old arrears, and but 88. 4d. in bad debts. Thrice only the society has had to sue for rent in the county courts, and in each case the tenant refused from obstinacy, not from inability to pay. The secret of the rare success of this society has been in the heartiness, honesty, and sound sense of its promoters-perhaps most in their heartiness; for they have not deputed the work to others, but done it themselves, whereby they have avoided all jobbery, ostentation, and machinery. According to Mr. Ruskin's formula, they knew what they had to do, and they did it. Other societies have been stranded by the ambition of having something to show for their money, and have made their main object the erection of new and complete buildings. The Hastings Society has, according to its title, entirely confined itself to improving existing buildings, buying up stacks and rows of ill-drained, illventilated, and ill-lighted houses, and giving them dryness, air, and sunshine. They do not affect model perfection, but substantial improvement; and the result is physical and moral amelioration, walking step by step with material reform and commercial success. Their example is to be strongly recommended to the London Societies, who, by restricting themselves for a time to the repair and refitting of old buildings instead of erecting new, might undoubtedly, by judicions selection, recover the depressed state of their finances, and so, after a probationary season of humbler but not less useful work, go on at length to the perfection at which they aim. The like course might also be often most advantageously adopted in our country villages. It is at times a much greater kindness and far more economical to add to or repair an old house, than to set up a bran new one. Lord Palmerston never spoke with more sense and less flippancy than when he dilated upon this point in his late speech at the Romsey Agricultural Society. The special convenience of tenants can thus be much better met; and we should not find, as is the case sometimes in model cottages, some poor old body moaning over the uselessness of a large, cold room, or the desolation of unoccupied bed-chambers. Every sort of accommodation, from one room to six, is needed for a village population. No one could be expected to erect new buildings to meet all these contingencies; but a considerate attention would easily find means of satisfying all reasonable requirements, by repairing and altering existing houses. 'We would give up,' says the writer we have already quoted, much of the regularity and dividual kindness and consideration. trimness of a Martinet village for marks of inWhile place of those that are utterly decayed, we new cottages, built here and there, take the should like to see this cottage patched up for Widow Toogood, where she and her old man have lived for more than half a century-that bedroom added for poor Tom Longlegs' increasing family that little shed knocked up for Jolter the carrier-an extra bit of green allotted to Dame Twoshoes, who takes in the washing -a little lean-to permitted, next his son's, for old Master Creeper, who needs no house of his own, and cannot hobble up-stairs. These things show the real personal superintendence of one who cares for the people committed to his charge, and not the mere activity of an agent.' Of this we may rest assured, that the interest now taken in this matter will not be allowed to flag. It would have astonished a macaroni of the last century to see an essay by the Marquis of Westminster on a Drainer's Dress' side by side with the Duke of Bedford's plans for cottages in the same number of the Agricultural Journal;' but the desire to promote the welfare of the agricultural labourer by all who come into contact with him is universally acknowledged, and by no one more than by himself. We wish we could believe that as good days were coming for the poorer classes of the town populations. with means to make his new freehold respectable, may be assured that in strengthening the stake of his poor neighbour's property he has not weakened his own. ART. II.-Souvenirs et Correspondance de Madame Récamier. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris. 1860. There is yet one matter in which our landed proprietors might most serviceably aid in cottage-improvement. In many parishes the manorial tenure is often the sole obstacle to better dwellings, where encroachments on the waste have given uncertain ownership, and the parish, the lord of the 'Je ne me suis peinte qu'en buste' was the manor, and the occupier dispute rather whose well-known reply of Madame de Staal, née property it is not, than whose it is. This is Delauny, to those who asked her why in her the most hopeless case, for even repairs are autobiography she had passed silently over not effected, much less improvement; and various well-known and interesting passages too often the tenement, which none think of her life. Far be it from us to compare, worth an outlay, becomes, when the blood of except by way of the most innocent illustraproprietorship is once up, a bone of conten- tion, the case of that clever gamine of former tion between parties who can little afford to days with that of the decorous and distinbe at variance. The end is that the poor guished queen of fashion of whom the Souman is either heartlessly swept away from venirs' are now before us. But autobiography the home of his fathers, or gains the short- and memoirs by near relatives are apt to be lived and disastrous triumph of retaining the equally misleading, whether by misstatement paltry prize in the teeth of those to whom or omission; while the latter have nothing he must look for his bread. Few parishes of the fresh and truthful vivacity of the are without some of this bitter experience, former. The Souvenirs before us, though but in many the nature of the soil and preva- published anonymously, are well known to lence of copyhold have made it the rule. have been compiled by Madame Récamier's These huts and hovels take the place of niece, the favourite companion of her latter houses, and, like the mother's pet, are clung years, Madame Lenormant, herself the into all the more for their weakness and worth- heritress of no common share of the characlessness. No kinder act could be done to teristic beauty of her family, since in her the rural poor than the compulsory commuta- youth she reminded Madame d'Abrantes of tion of these questionable tenures into free- Gérard's exquisite figure of Psyche.* Maholds. Often it would be better that the dame Lenormant has proved that she inherits landowner should have them, sometimes it other family qualities of a high order, by the would be fairest to assign them at once to continued friendship which unites her to the tenant; but as there is no root of revolu- some of the most illustrious surviving memtion so deep as the agrarian one, it would be bers of her aunt's society. And yet, with well to cut off, before it has too widely spread ample power to do justice to her subject, and itself in the social soil, an evil which is daily possessed of abundant materials, she has fostering discontent and defiance among the thought proper so to tone down her performtillers of the land, and for which they might ance in order not to shock a single sensibility, fairly expect the law to find an easy and or jar. the nerves of any reader of quality, equitable remedy. When the work of landed that the result is almost purely negative. accumulation is going on so fast, a few thou- We are compelled, at the end, to ask oursand additional small freeholds would be a selves the question, could the placid, vapid, political gain, not to the landed interest only, uninteresting creature, whose life is detailed but to the whole state. But the jealousy in these somewhat monotonous pages, have which is felt towards the cottage-freeholder been that famous enchantress who had the by the farmer, and still more by the steward, leading men of French society, literature, and can only be appreciated by those who have politics, at her feet for half a century; who lived among them. Legislation is not likely saw royalties and republics flourish and fade, to be speeded in this direction. It is a gen- while she continued to reign unquestioned by tleman's question to be taken into his own right of beauty and gracefulness? whose hands; and he that can have the heart peculiar and crowning quality it was, that, to abate the jots and tittles of his feudal claims, and not only enfranchise his copyholder, but, if the case requires it, set him up mier we shall presently notice, terms this lady the 'original' of Gérard's Psyche; a strange mistake. *M. Rondelet, whose Memoir of Madame Réca while she yielded her heart to none, she in- | result, as far as poor Truth is concerned, is spired through life, in the strongest minds of pretty much the same) a complete change both sexes, passions of friendship as exclusive, has come over the taste of the externally dejealous, and overmastering, as those of love corous circles of literary fashion. As if in itself? permanent protest against the degradation of the sex in such hands as those of George Sand and Balzac, they seem to have established an ideal grounded on Madame de Genlis's maxim, that, while 'il a fait parler de soi' is always a compliment, elle a fait parler d'elle' is always the reverse. Nay, more than this; the perfect heroine, to suit the taste of such readers, must be something of a saint; her biography must have a vaporous, ethereal touch of hagiology about it-piety, sweetness, humility, charity, these must be the features prominently brought forward, almost to the effacement of all others; lovely features doubtless, but no more representing the full character and perfections of the sex, than the seraphic but monotonous countenances of Fra Angelico represent the faces of actual womankind-of those who have been sent not as angels, but as the companions, and at once the teachers and the scholars, of imperfect man. It is, we fear, undeniable, that plain truth of fact, in history or in biography, has no attraction at all for our clever neighbours. Every narrative must have its moral, or burden, or idea.' Mere undraped truth neither meets with popularity, nor expects it. Not that there is any deception practised on the public in this permitted dalliance with facts. The readers are as much partners in the imposture as the writers themselves. They do not expect truth; they expect an article made up for the market-made to suit the preconceived opinions of the philosophical democrat, the legitimist, the freethinker, the pious, as the case may be. They accept works under the title of history or biography, but they know them to be either romances or pamphlets; they treat them as such, and criticise them as such. They make up their minds to find certain classes of facts distorted to suit certain views, and they would scarcely consider that the author fulfilled the promise of his name and antecedents, or the undertaking of his preface, unless this object were accomplished. They know the value of historical accuracy quite as well as others, and attain to it, in the end, quite as nearly. But they consider it as something to be arrived at by every man for himself, through the process of comparing and analysing the various accounts set before him by the apologists, advocates, satirists, panegyrists, who, with the full approval or connivance of the public, call themselves historians and biographers. Nowhere has this increasing tendency of French literature more strongly manifested itself than in the memoirs of celebrated women, both of our own time and some generations back, of which these latter years have been peculiarly productive. If it be true to any extent, that most women have no characters at all,' this renders only the more easy the task of the popular biographer, who, in order to please the fashionable taste of the day, must round off all angles, and efface all characteristics, and produce a result fashioned as nearly to order' as the case will allow. The leading women of the last century were witty and immoral. This was the prevailing ideal of womankind; and any one versed in the literature of that era will notice the amusing endeavours of biographers to give to quiet, commonplace ladies, who never said a clever thing, nor did a naughty one, something of the sparkle and piquancy of an Arnould or a d'Epinay. Now (and certainly to the credit of the age, though the There appeared last year a little work, under the title of 'Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans;' a short memoir of that lamented princess. It was beautifully written, and was for the time in all the fair and fashionable hands of Paris, and very popular among the like classes here. Yet of life-like reality it was absolutely destitute. It had not a single characteristic feature of that noble-minded woman. The Duchess, as is well known, had that in her character as well as her fate, which, in rougher days, would have made one of Shakspeare's historical heroines. Devoted to her husband, devoted in after days to her children, high principled and resolute, she combined no small amount of masculine energy with something of feminine self-will. Her straightforward unmanageable ways were the despair as well as the admiration of the crafty but singularly unsuccessful school of politicians with whom she was associated. And to add one more trait to her character, which in this country, at least, is not without its interest, young as she was when married, she remained firmly attached to the Protestant religion in which she was educated, resisting uniformly all the seductions of the tenderest love and kindness, more powerful than persecution over a nature like hers, and extorting, by her firmness, the admiration of those who, in the strength of their own persuasion, would have rejoiced the most over her conversion. Now, in the biography to which we refer, this very woman, in her strength as in her weakness, comes out from the clever refiner's crucible a mere negative compound full of sweetness and purity, without one par-rently acquainted with her family. We can ticle of more worldly savour-a kind of mar- but cite, in addition, the literary notices of ried sister of charity, or Saint Elizabeth of this distinguished lady by Madame de Genlis, Hungary. Of the struggles of maternal love, Sainte-Beuve, Guizot, and others, and the and queenly policy, and disappointed ambi- thousand little traditions of her celebrity which tion, not a single word-and (unless our me- still haunt her much-loved metropolis. mory deceives us) it is not even mentioned throughout the book that the Royal lady was a Protestant at all! We are bound to say that it is in very similar style that Madame Lenormant has executed this pious tribute to the memory of her relative. She has smoothed away everything salient and characteristic-for fear of offence, we suppose and left behind nothing but a kind of shadowy portrait, unreal and featureless. Yet her subject was a woman of fortunes so very remarkable, that it is impossible not to believe that her character likewise must have been of no ordinary type. Her empire in society was more decided and more deeply rooted than that of any contemporary -perhaps even than those of her brilliant predecessors of the former century; and she seemed peculiarly to possess the secret of exercising her power without display or pretension. She held on, without effort, the even tenor of her course, offering to the world no point of weakness or inconsistency. And yet, internally, her life was all the while a riddle and a contradiction-inexplicable perhaps to herself, and certainly tasking the ingenuity of her strongest admirers to afford a reasonable explanation. Madame Récamier was not by habit a writer. She was not fond of the employment, according to her niece, and disliked even the trouble of composing a long letter. Nevertheless we are informed that in the latter part of her life she found amusement in compiling a memoir of herself; that this work was partially communicated to her by her friend M. de Châteaubriand, and has been used by him in long fragments, in his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe.' But her niece is ignorant how far she may have proceeded in this task; for she ordered by will the destruction of the manuscript, which was religiously obeyed. The present volumes have, therefore, the revelations already made public by Châteaubriand as their basis, together with Madame Lenormant's own narrative of the latter portion of her aunt's life, many letters of her friends, and a few of her own. We can but use the materials thus placed before us, though with a full consciousness of their inadequacy, and eke them out with such additions as we can find. The little book of M. Rondelet, 'Madame Récamier, ouvrage couronné par l'Académie de Lyon,' is an oratorical panegyric; but it is of some value as proceeding from one of her townsmen, appa Mademoiselle Bernard (whose full style and title was Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adelaide, but who was known through life by her first nom de caresse as Juliet) was born at Lyons in 1777, the daughter of a notary of a good citizen family of that place. Her education was that of the convent, and she loved to dwell on the tranquil image of her schooldays. Elle me revient quelquefois, cette époque,' she says charmingly in one of those extracts from her memoirs which Châteaubriand has preserved, and perhaps poeticised, Elle me revient quelquefois, comme dans un vague et doux rêve, avec ses nuages d'encens, ses cérémonies. infinies, ses processions dans les jardins, ses chants et ses fleurs.' But, from her earliest girlhood she was distinguished among her companions by her extraordinary beauty. Whatever might be said as to her superiority in other respects, in this it was incontestable, and continued so for a far longer period than is usually allotted to this kind of supremacy. The homage paid to it was of an almost unexampled character, but reminding us of the extravagances into which our phlegmatic ancestors were betrayed for the sister Gunnings a hundred years ago, and of the more decorous homage paid in later times to the Sheridans. She had been duly prepared for it from her earliest years. She used to recount how, when she was a little child, a wrathful neighbour, who caught her in the fact of climbing his fence with, a comrade to steal his fruit, was so subdued by her charms as she sate crying on the top of the wall, that he let her go with her apron full instead of taking summary vengeance. At twelve years old Marie Antoinette, in her simple fondness for childhood and beauty, picked her out from the crowd of strangers assembled to gaze on royalty at Versailles. She was made to stand back to back with her contemporary Madame Royale,' afterwards Duchess of Angoulême, whose pride was mortified at finding the little plebeian at once a trifle taller and a great deal handsomer than herself. When the churches were reopened after the Revolution, and she, being then comparatively unknown, collected alms as 'quêteuse' at Saint Roch, the pressure of the crowd was so great that her friends were compelled to extricate her by force. When she drove along the pavement at Longchamps in the summer of 1801, she was publicly saluted by the spectators as 'la plus belle, à l'unanimité.' The same intoxicating |