The Press.
London, England, 1858-07-10 00:00:00

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

Blackwood this month contains a preponderance of
grave articles—grave, but good. The opening one is
on a most interesting subject, and ably executed; but
if it has a fault, we should should say it is treated in
too purely literary a style. " The Soldier and the
Survon " is the title of it, and the sanitary conili•
Lion of the army the subject it discusses. The fol-
lowing extract contains opinions over and over again
enforced in our own columns :

;his, as we say, comes close to the point. Frankly, we
would have the entire condition of the common soldier
uplifted in the social scale, by the expenditure necessary
to produce that result. If we are told that this may coat
the nation two or three millions, the answer is, that they
would be well expended. Perhaps some one will say that
the army is not a mercenary profession. This argument
may be decorously employed by those who receive, but not
by those who give. The parson and the surgeon of the
parish arc not perhaps mercenary, and yet if each have not
a good house anti clean linen, with the means of educating
his family, the usefulness of his functions will be impaired,
and the position dins children will sink in the scale of'
civilization. it may be truly urged that our troops cost
more by the head than any other troops in the worlds but
yet it is notorious that iu scarcely any other country is the
soldier sn far below the level of the other citizen. Until
he reaches a position corresponding to what he holds in
other nations, we maintain that the expenditure assigned
to him is insufficient. From the constvution and habits
of this country—especially from our way of dealing with the
army—money is the sole means by which the amendment
can be accomplished. We have ceased to be in any way a
feudal people—we buy all services in hard cash—and we
must pay what they are worth, instead of attempting,
through the flaunting recruiting-sergeant at the gin-house
door, to obtain them by a combination of fraud and force.
In "What will he do with it ?" we have the full history
of Arabella Crane and Jasper Lonely revealed to us,
as also the mysterious connection between these
people and Darrell. The following sketch of Parisian
society is in Sir Bulwer's happiest style :
In that strange social fermentation which still prevails
in a country where an aristocracy of birth, exceedingly im-
poverished, and exceedingly numerous su far as the right
to prefix a De to the name, or to stamp a coronet on the
card, can constitute an aristocrat—is diffused amongst an
ambitious, adventurous, restless, and not inelegant young
democracy—each cemented with the other by that fiction
of law called egalite ; —in that yet unsettled and struggling
society in which so much of the old has been irretrievably
destroyed, and so little of the new has been solidly con-
structed—there are much greater varieties, infinitely more
subtle grades and distinctions, in the region of life which
lies between respectabiiity and disgrace, than can be found
in a country like oars. The French novels and dramas
may apply less a mirror than a magnifying glass to the
beings that move through that region. But still those
Freue a novels and dramas do not unfaithfully represent
the elassificationa of which they exaggerate the types.
Those strange combinations, into one tableau, of students
and grisettes, opera-dancers, authors, vlscounts, swindlers,
romantic Lorettee, gamblers on the Bourse, whose pedi-
gree dales from the Crusades ; imposters, taking titles from
villages in which their grandsires mig a have been oa
dlera ; and if detected, the detection but R matter of laugh ;
delicate women living like lawless men ; men making trade
out of love, like dissolute women, yet with point of honour
so nice, that, doubt their truth or their courage, and—pill'!
—you are in Charon's boat,—humanity in every civilized
land may present single specimens. more or less, answer-
ing to each thus described. Rn t where, save in France,
find them all, if not precisely in the sante salons, yet so
crossing each other to and fro, as to constitute a social
phase, and give colour to a literature of unquestionable
genius ? And where, over orgies so miocellsneougly Bery-
cynthian, an atmosphere so elegantly Horatian? And
where can coarseness so vanish into polished expression as
in thot diamond-like language—all terseness and sparkle—
which, as friendly to Wit in its airiest prose, as hostile to
Passion in its torrent or clond-wrack of poetry, seems in-
vented by the Grace out of spite to the Muse ?
" A Plea for the Principalities " is an article founded
• on a pamphlet by a native of that country, strongly

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