PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY
LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

it is fed by a gentleman of the family; if the child has reached his fifteenth year, a a girl, by a lady.” The account of the fortunate day is chosen on which the proceedings on this occasion, as given by forelock is cut off, and at this period, the Japanese Record of Ceremonies, is being considered a man, he is entrusted decidedly amusing to the European mind, with swords of ordinary size; and on this but is somewhat too long for quotation occasion in particular great family festivhere. ities and rejoicings take place in honour of the auspicious event. The lad then comes of age, and, casting away childish things, adopts the dress of a grown-up man in every particular. Japanese youths are said to be quite equal to the occasion, and, even at this early age, to adapt themselves most readily to the habits of manhood.

At the stages in his life which we have alluded to, the child has a sponsor, and certain wine-drinking customs and prescribed festivities have to be carefully attended to.

When he is three years old, the Japanese infant is invested with a sword belt, and four years later with two diminutive swords, if he belong to the privileged class. The child's head is completely shaved until he is close upon four years old, and then three patches are grown, one at the back and one at each side. On this occasion the Record of Ceremonies ordains that "a large tray, on which are a comb, scissors, paper-string, a piece of string for tying the hair in a knot, cotton wool, and the bit of dried fish or seaweed which accompanies presents, Some Japanese must have a string of one of each, and seven rice straws names, awful to contemplate, if strict these seven articles must be prepared." custom be always adhered to; for, beIn another year's time the child is put sides the name which he receives shortly into the loose trousers peculiar to the after his birth, Humbert tells us that "he privileged class, and he is then presented will take a second on attaining his majorwith "a dress of ceremony, on which are ity, a third at his marriage, a fourth when embroidered storks and tortoises (em- he shall be appointed to any public funcblems of longevity; the stork is said to tion, a fifth when he shall ascend in rank live a thousand years, the tortoise ten or in dignity, and so on until the last, the thousand), fir-trees (which being ever-name which shall be given him after his green, and not changing their colour, are death, and inscribed upon his tomb— emblematic of an unchangingly virtuous that by which his memory shall be held heart), and bamboos (emblematic of an sacred from generation to generation." upright and straight mind.)" Soon after

banker; and yet two or three do manage to live and die. without his taking charge of

their little all.

SOMEBODY has been writing in one of the papers about the base sovereigns that are current composed of platinum, and very hard to detect; and he goes on to say:-" "At present, if a man offers a false coin, having a similar false coin in his possession, the statute throws upon him the onus of satisfactorily proving his own innocence. But, if many of AFFECTIVE FACULTIES. Having much of these false sovereigns are about, it is quite one of the affective faculties, we do not like possible that an innocent man should have to be exposed to the acute exercise of the two of them in his possession at once. In- same faculty in others. A person with large deed, the only practical advice of which the veneration shrinks from being an object of position admits is that we should never accept veneration to others. (To one with large selfa sovereign in change, except from our bank-esteem, the veneration of others is, on the ers." What practical advice! and what rich people we must all be! Pray, how many per cent. of our respectable population have banking accounts? We are reminded of the man in one of Mr. Gaskell's novels, who, out at dinner, was perfectly astounded that his hosts did not grow their own pineapples. "No pinery!" he said, in accents of condolence. Let us all join in pitying the man without a

contrary, agreeable.) One with large acquisitiveness detests being subjected to the action of powerful acquisitiveness in his neighbours. It has often been observed that individuals who are much given to jesting at the expense of their fellow-creatures cannot endure to be the subject of other people's jokes, and that great censurers and reprovers hate to be in the least rebuked or found fault with.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY
LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGB will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor when we have to pay commission for forwarding the money; nor when we club the LIVING Age with another periodical.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

From The Quarterly Review.

PROSPER MERIMEE: HIS LETTERS AND

WORKS.*

The extraordinary amount of interest taken in her is owing to something more than the Parisian love of scandal, gossip, No literary event since the war has or mystery. Prosper Mérimée belonged excited anything like such a sensa- to that brilliant generation of which MM. tion in Paris as the publication of the Thiers and Guizot are the last, and he Lettres à une Inconnue. Even politics will be remembered longer than many of became a secondary consideration for the those by whom he was temporarily outhour, and academicians or deputies of op- shone. His character was no less reposite parties might be seen eagerly ac-markable than his genius; and the costing each other in the Chamber or the strangely contrasted qualities that formed street to inquire who this fascinating and it will be found almost as well worth perplexing "unknown" could be. The studying as his works. It was because statement in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" that she was an Englishwoman, moving in brilliant society, was not supported by evidence; and M. Blanchard, the painter, from whom the publisher received the manuscripts, died most provokingly at the very commencement of the inquiry and made no sign. Some intimate friends of Mérimée, rendered incredulous by wounded self-love at not having been admitted to his confidence, insisted that there was no secret to tell; their hypothesis being that the Inconnue was a myth, and the letters a romance, with which some petty details of actual life had been interwoven (as in "Gulliver's Travels" or "Robinson Crusoe") to keep up the mystification. But an artist like Mérimée would not have left his work in so unformed a state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion between the parts. With the evidence before us as we write, we in

he was an enigma when living that people are so eager to know everything concerning him when dead. Was his cynicism real or affected? Had he, or had he not, a heart? Did he, or could he, love anything or anybody at any time? Was he a good or bad man? a happy or unhappy one? These are among the problems raised by the letters, and which M. Taine proposes to solve, or assist in solving, by his acute and discriminating "Etude."

I have often [he commenced] met Mérimée in society. He was tall, upright, pale, and, with the exception of the smile, he had the look of an Englishman; at least, he had that cold, distant air which checks all familiarity from the first. To see him was enough to feel in him the phlegm natural or acquired, the self-command, the will and the habit of being on his guard. In ceremony above all, his physiognomy was impassible. Even in intimacy, and when he related a droll anecdote,

his voice remained unbroken and calm: no éclat or élan; he told the raciest details, in appropriate terms, in the tone of a man who was asking for a cup of tea. Sensibility in him was toned down to the point of appearing absent: not that it was; quite the contrary; but there are thoroughbred horses so well broken by their master that, once well in hand, they no longer venture on a gambol.

cline to the belief that the lady was French by birth, and during the early years of the correspondence in the position of dame de compagnie or travelling companion to a Madame M- de B—, who passes in the letters under the pseudonym of Lady M. It appears from one of them that she inThis closely corresponds with the charherited a fortune in 1843; and she has acter of Saint-Clair in his novel of the been confidently identified with a respect-"Vase Etrusque," evidently intended for able single lady residing in Paris, with his own:— two nieces, and a character for pedantry fastened on her (perhaps unjustly) on the strength of the Greek which (as we shall see) she learned from Mérimée.

Lettres à une Inconnue. Par Prosper Mérimée, de l'Académie Française. Précédées d'une Etude sur Mérimée, par H. Taine. Paris, 1874.

He (Saint-Clair) was born with a tender and loving heart; but at an age when we too easily receive impressions which last through life, his too expansive sensibility had provoked the raillery of his comrades. Thenceforward he studied to conceal the outward and visible signs of what he regarded as a dishonouring