Are they who rule and fashion laws—
Things that are chiefly made of flaws.
And yet men dub them great; the while
Angels or weep or pitying smile.
But why, blind as they are, why rail about them?
The world’s so bad, it cannot do without them!
If a reviewer were malicious, he might turn the reasoning in the last line against the author, and conclude that the philosophy it so concisely expresses, made him hope that the world could not do without his own poems.
The Orators of France. By Viscount de Cormenin. Translated by a Member of the New York Bar. With an Essay by J. T. Headley. Edited by G. H. Colton. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.
The popularity of this book in France has been very great. The present translation is from the fourteenth Paris edition, and shines with the author’s last polishing touches. The introductory essay by Headley, on the rise of French Revolutionary eloquence, and the orators of the Girondists, contains much information which the reader of the sketches will find useful. Mr. Colton has ably edited the work, and supplied some fifty pages of biographical addenda.