When M. Guizot, many years ago, published his "Collection of Memoirs relating to the History of the Revolution in England," in twenty-seven volumes, he added to that great work biographical sketches of the various authors whose works he had translated. Those biographical studies, carefully revised and corrected, with some that he had contributed to dictionaries, and others entirely new, are now collected into a volume of Bohn's Library (New-York, Bangs & Brother), and, with the memoirs of General Monk, constitute a sort of gallery of portraits, in which personages of the most different characters appear in contrast—chiefs or champions of sects or parties, Parliamentarians, Cavaliers, Republicans, and Levellers, who, either at the termination of the political conflicts in which they were engaged, or when in retirement towards the close of their lives, described themselves, their own times, and the parts they played therein. M. Guizot has written the History of the English Revolution in these lives of the Revolutionists; for all parties were revolutionary in those days—the Cavaliers by their denial of right no less than the Parliamentarians by their assertion of it. The studies are of Denzil Hollis, Edmund Ludlow, Thomas May, Sir P. Warwick, John Lilburne, Fairfax, Mr. Hutchinson, Sir Thomas Herbert, John Price, Lord Clarendon, Burnet, the Duke of Buckingham, Sir John Reresby, with notices of the Eikôn Basiliké, &c., and Memoirs of James II.—a sufficient variety to enable the author to exhibit all the facettes of the diamond.
At the distribution of prizes awarded to pupils in the various colleges of Paris, three or four weeks ago, the new Superior Council of Public Instruction, including MM. Thenard, Giraud, Daniel-Poinsot, and Ortila, attended officially at the Sorbornne: they were placed behind the Minister of Public Instruction, beside whom were M. Portalis, President of the Court of Cassation, and M. Saint-Marc Girardin, Secretary of the Council. The other members of the Council who assisted the Minister were M. Dupin, President of the National Assembly; M. Laplagne-Barras, wearing the magnificent dress of the superior officers of the Court of Cassation; Cardinal Gousset, seated, wearing the scarlet robe and hat of his office, &c. But the real hero of the solemnity was Guizot, who, on his entrance into the hall to resume his ancient place among the professors, was greeted with loud acclamations and the most respectful salutations, which were repeated still more warmly when the name of his son, William Guizot, was pronounced as of one of the prizemen.
A new novel, in two volumes, by Eugene Sue, with the title of Miss Mary; a tale by Henri Murger, called Claude et Marianne; and volumes iv. and v. of Ange Pitou, by Alexander Dumas, have just appeared in Paris.
The witty feuilletoniste, Jules Janin, has published in a volume the letters he wrote from London during the Great Exhibition to the Journal des Debats. J. J., as everybody knows, is the most delightful journalist of art and society in the world, and all Paris anticipates the articles under his signature as a principal part of each day's satisfaction. Apropos of this new book of his, the London Morning Chronicle says, "From the first line to the last, he has rioted in his own peculiar style—laughed, cried, sung, danced, in the same, and almost in every breath—jumped about in one page like a kitten catching its tail—and struck himself into an awful attitude of moral meditation, with an aspect as wise as Aristotle's, in the next—accomplishing all these literary feats by a most miraculous outpouring of words—capital words, fanciful, witty, fantastic, scholarly words—and jumbled, tossed, piled up on each others' backs—jerked this way and that—sharpened one against the other, glittering and gleaming, one by the aid of another—a perfect firework of words, Roman-candle sentences, and Catherine-wheel periods—rockets of epithets, and girandoles of antitheses!" But yet Janin's self-respect would not allow him to say that, in some instances, he has "sacrificed thought and sense, pith and shrewdness, to build up a barley-sugar temple of verbal prettiness, and to deck and wreath it with artificial flowers of rhetoric and of phraseology, which for a moment may seem to have smell, and sap, and savor, but which, upon closer inspection, too often reveal themselves in their true, and dry, and dreary substance of wire, and gauze, and calico."
One M. Leon de Montbeillard has published a work on Spinoza. If that Philosopher has one characteristic more eminent than another, it is commonly supposed to be the precision and exactness of his logic. To say that Spinoza was a rigorous logician is a platitude, a truism. M. Montbeillard declines to walk in such a beaten path. He denies that Spinoza has any skill whatever in the science of reason, that he is a mere rhapsodist!