some freak of creation, whose mission is to make novels--and
who accordingly spins, spins away, and never leaves off for
a moment--never! We know how M. Dumas manages to rear his
wonderful literary offspring. With all Mr. James's fertility,
however, the Frenchman has a thousand times Mr. James's
invention. The romances of the latter are simply a series
of ever-changing, yet never novel variations upon the one
original theme furnished by Sir Walter Scott. Dumas, with his
eighty volumes a year, yet manages to be ever fresh, ever
new. Nobody knows, till he reads it, what a novel of the
Frenchman's will be. Everybody, even before he cuts open
page one, can tell you the certain features, the stereotyped
characters, which flourish in eternal youth in the
never-ending productions of James. It is only calling them
by other names, and dressing them in different
costumes--altering, in the description of a castle, the dais
from the one end of the great hall to the other, or some such
important revolution--and _presto_, Mr. James can whip the
personages and the places who flourished in one country and
in one century right slap into another generation and another
land. The thing is done in a moment, and you have a new novel
before you--just as new, at all events, as is any in his list
of a hundred."

* * * * *

Botta's "Nineveh" has at last reached completion at Paris. It consists
of five folio volumes of the largest size; only 400 copies have been
printed; 300 of them are to be distributed by the Government, and 100
for booksellers, to be sold. The price is 1800 francs a copy, or about