The Sun. — 1863-06-13 (London, England)

LITERATURE.  La Soreiere ; the Witch of the Middle Ages. From; the French of J. Michelet. By L. J. Trotter. One vol, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. It would not be in any way extravagant to remark of the author of this book—not of the translator, observe, but of the original author of it—that his reputation stinks in the nostrils of Europe. It is a name that is nothing less than a brand upon a title page. His offence, like Hamlet's stepfather's, is rank and smells to heaven. The most notorious among all his writings—a miserable, tainted, loathsome work in itself and in its influences—the pitiable production known under the title of " Priests, Women and Families," has now for a long while past rendered the name of Michelet in all parts of Christendom an object of abhorrence. That the man is clever, that he is a scholar, that he has erudition, that he has many of the more seductive gifts of a master rhetorician, there can unhappily be but little doubt. It is the fact that there are these peculiarities about him that renders his influence so pernicious, wherever his influence extends. Never has there been a more odious perversion of intellectual capacity, we believe, than has been witnessed throughout his literary career. He is the Evil Genius of French literature. His standish is the can dron from which he draws the hellbroth of his incantations. His pen is the wand of malign power with which he exercises his only magical influence over the minds of his disciples, that wielded through the black magic of a profane and salacious imagination. Here, in this horrible work, entitled "La Sorciere," is the very latest ebullition of that unhappy fancy seething and boiling over the pages with a certain hot, lava-like eloquence, bat scathing and blasting and withering all around it as it flows. The notion of the work is from first to last extravagant. It throughout seems to be avowedly and flagrantly maiific. Instead of calling to his aid the good angels —the writer appears to be here bent upon summoning to his assistance only swarms upon swarms of diahlerie. Chapter after chapter, as we read, the ground we traverse, is the reverse of the holy ground of fairyland. It resembles more exactly than any fairyful region we can recall to mind the " blasted heath" where those " dark and midnight hags," the three Witches, confronted. Macbeth, the Thane of Glamis, the Thane of Cawdor, the murderous King of the Hereafter. Only that, instead of three Witches, we have legions upon legions of them—till the ground is black with them, the air is filled with them, they swarm upon the scene, and pollute our imagination with the mere remembrance of them. It is for all the world as if the hellish revelries of the Jungfrau, all those riotous abominations of the Walpurgis, that even the daring genius of Goethe veils over with the densest shadows of midnight, were recounted and minutely depicted in all their hideous abandonment in the glare of noon-day by the brazen audacity of this horridly uncompromising Frenchman. How even a Michelet could pen the book, in the first instance, is scarcely comprehensible to us. Much more is it matter of amazement that he should with cool deliberation revise 'the original manuscript, carefully correct the proof-sheets, and phlegmatically commit the baneful volume, not, as he ought to have done, to the flames, but to the chance perusal of any one who lists to read it. We regret very much that the industry and skill devoted by Mr. Trotter to the task of its translation, should have been expended upon a work in itself so intrinsically worthless and so utterly perishable. As a literary production we cannot but look upon it, as we have before had occasion to do upon the rest of its author's compositions, as another apt illustration of that grizzly phantom floating by Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner" far away upon the rotting sea—to wit, " The Nightmare, Life in Death !" For if La Sordere has not come into the world of letters still-born, it has opened its purblind eyes to the light in a condition (we cannot but exult to think) decidedly moribund. Not a hand need be raised against it, to destroy it. Exposure, simply exposure, will prove quite sufficient to be the death of it.