The Paris correspondent of the Literary Gazette affirms that, on the whole, the French press has gained by the regulation requiring signatures to original articles. The abler class of contributors have profited greatly, as they have obtained a position in popular esteem, and consequently a claim on their employers, which years of anonymous drudgery would not have secured. Nor have readers, it is remarked, any cause to complain; for "men, remembering that 'those who live to please must please to live,' take far greater pains with the articles to which they have to attach their names, than to those which are unsigned."
M. Arago, the great astronomer, who is passing the summer at the mineral springs of Vichy, is nearly blind, and probably will entirely lose his sight. His brother, who is likewise a man of extraordinary abilities, has been blind many years.
George Sand dedicates her last performance to Dumas, "because," she says, "I wish to protest against the tendency that may be attributed to me of regarding the absence of action as a systematic reaction against the school of which you are the chief. Far from me such a blasphemy against movement and life! I am too fond of your works; I read them and listen to them with too much attention and emotion; I am too much an artist in feeling to wish the slightest lessening of your triumphs. Many believe that artists are necessarily jealous of each other. I pity those who believe it, pity them for having so little of the artist as not to understand that the idea of assassinating our rivals would be that of our own suicide."
A Critical History of the Philosophical School of Alexandria is the title of a work of serious philosophical claims, by M. Vacherot. He had already published two volumes analyzing and developing the doctrines of the Alexandrian philosophy. In the present volume he has traced its influence upon the subsequent schools, passing in review Plotinus and his successors. The scope of the work invites and permits a discussion of the profoundest problems that now agitate the world of thought, and M. Vacherot has the credit of acquitting himself adequately and admirably of his task.
Rousseau, on his death, left several papers to his friend Moulton, and the heirs of that person, in 1794, caused them to be deposited in the public library of Neufchatel, in Switzerland. There they have remained unknown until a few weeks since, when M. Bovet, of that town, examined them, and found that they embraced an essay entitled Avant-propos et Preface a mes Confessions, which has just been printed. Of course it will appear with all future editions of the Confessions.