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ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUE

CONTAINS

Designs and Prices of 150 different articles of
Bed-room Furniture, as well as of 100 Bedsteads,
and Prices of every description of Bedding.
SENT FREE BY POST.

HEAL AND SON,
Bedstead, Bedding, and Bed-room
Furniture Manufacturers,

196, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD,

LONDON.

SLACK'S NICKEL ELECTRO PLATE

IS A COATING OF PURE SILVER OVER NICKEL,
MANUFACTURED SOLELY BY R. AND J. SLACK.

It has stood twenty years' test, and still retains its

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durability and silver.
Strong-Plated
Fiddle Pattern.

£1 18 0

superiority over all others for

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Every Article for the Table as in Silver.

OLD GOODS REPLATED EQUAL TO NEW.

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SLACK'S TABLE CUTLERY
Has been celebrated for nearly 50 years for Quality and Cheapness.
Per doz. Per dox. Per dos.
148.
188. 203.

Balance-handle Ivory Table Knives,

SLACK'S FENDER, FIRE-IRON, AND GENERAL
FURNISHING IRONMONGERY WAREHOUSE.

Families Furnishing will find it to their advantage to inspect the
Stock and compare the prices.

A Set of Kitchen Furniture suitable for moderate size house, £4 118. 11d.
The Greatest Variety of Dish Covers in London, from 188. set of six.
Every article in Furnishing Ironmongery at equally low prices; all marked in plain Figures, and
Warranted. The money returned for any article not approved of.
Orders above £2, Carriage Free, per Rail.

RICHARD AND JOHN SLACK,

336, STRAND, OPPOSITE SOMERSET HOUSE.

Slack's Catalogue with 350 Engravings Gratis, or Post Free.

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PATENT ELECTRO PLATE

4 10 0 500 7 5 0 5 10 0 500 5 5 0

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Complete Service £10 12 10 14 9 6 17 6 0 20 12 6

Any Article sold separately at the above rate, which is one-third less than the usual charges. One Set of Four Corner Dishes (forming 8 Dishes), £5; one Set of Four Dish Covers-viz., one 20-inch, one 18-inch, and two 14-inch-£9 188.; Cruet Frame, 4-Glass, 20s.; Fullsize Tea and Coffee Service, £9 10s. A Costly Book of Engravings, with prices attached, sent per post gratis. Spoon and Forks of equal quality usually charged one-third more.

This Establishment, the oldest of its class in London, dating from Queen Elizabeth, when it was known as the Old Golden Ball, of Bowyer Row (now Ludgate Street), ought to be a guarantee of the quality of the wares now offered. Full information about prices, copiously illustrated (with 100 designs), is contained in a new Catalogue (Gratis). Thomas West, 18, Ludgate Street, London. Manufactory, Victoria Works.

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EVERY WATCH IN THE LATEST STYLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY FINISHED.

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Every Watch skilfully Examined, Timed, and its Performance Guaranteed.

POST-OFFICE ORDERS PAYABLE TO

JOHN BENNETT, 65, CHEAPSIDE, LONDON.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

JULY, 1860.

SWISS-FRENCH LITERATURE: MADAME DE GASPARIN.

BY J. M. LUDLOW.

THE surface of the earth has goldfields intellectual, as it has material. Take a map of Switzerland, draw a line SS.W. from about Bâle to Martigny, not straight, but incurved so as to follow the valleys of the Upper Birse, the middle Aare, and the Saane, and you will have marked out one of such, of which the Eldorado diggings, or richest nugget-nest, will be found at the southwestern extremity. Within that field, about as large as Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex together, more of intellectual power has been developed than in many a great empire; in that Eldorado corner a good three-fifths of the whole has taken its rise. The tract in question embraces the Jura chain and the greater part of the valley between its eastern slopes and the western ones of the Alps, so far as the Gallic tide has extended until met and arrested by the Teutonic. With an outlying district or two, such as the valley of the Upper Rhône as far as Visp, it represents French Switzer

land.

Strange to say, indeed, this gold-field is but of comparatively recent discovery. Three centuries alone have seen its treasures brought to light. Nothing in the earlier history of Switzerland foretold its splendours. The great names of that earlier history are all German. From Tell to Zwingli the Teutonic race has a monopoly of Swiss glory. Basel-not yet Bâle-is in some respects the Geneva of No. 9.-VOL. II.

the early half of the sixteenth century, -a centre of free thought. From Froben's presses are poured forth the works of Erasmus, of Luther; Erasmus comes to die beside his friend. French Switzerland only wakens up from the day when Farel, the restless apostle of French Protestantism, invading Switzerland, carries Neufchâtel as by assault (1530), and on his return from a synod of the Waldenses of Piedmont, stops at Geneva (1532), where in three years (1532-5) the bishop's yoke is broken from off the city, and political independence is the fruit of religious reform. Farel is succeeded by those other great Frenchmen, Calvin and De Bèze, and under them grows up that marvellous theocracy which, however stern and oppressive it may show itself to us under some of its aspects, yet made Geneva one of the very centres of European thought. Think of one small town having given in three centuries, to physical science Saussure, Deluc, De Candolle, Huber; Charles Bonnet to metaphysics; to jurisprudence, Burlamaqui, Delolme, Dumont (not to speak of our Romilly, a Genevese watchmaker's son); to history, Sismondi, Guizot; Necker and Sismondi again to political economy; to diplomacy, Albert Gallatin; to literature proper, Rousseau and Madame de Stael,-besides the Diodatis, Leclercs, Senebiers, Mallets, Pictets, and other miscellaneous celebrities.

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Protestantism, therefore, may be said to have created French Switzerland; Protestantism is that which has made it entitled to stand out before Europe as the representative of all Switzerland. It is easy to see why. If there be one marked characteristic of the Swiss race, it is its individualism. Inhabiting for the most part a very thinly populated country, always at war, so to speak, with nature, since even his sunniest valleys are swept by the wintry mountain blasts, the Switzer is obliged to earn his own living, to fight his own way. He is essentially a worker and a fighter; shrewd, prudent, determined; endowed with more good sense than genius; his thrift shading easily into avarice; a trader even when he fights. Now the Calvinistic reformation is the most individualizing of all the theological movements of the sixteenth century, and it was thus admirably adapted to the tendencies of the Swiss mind, whilst the position of Geneva, as a harbour for French Protestantism whenever expelled by fire and sword from its own country, and thereby in constant antagonism with Romanist France, Romanist France, tended to develop this character to the uttermost. Not, indeed, but what the Protestant cantons of German Switzerland have always held a respectable place in the intellectual annals of Europe. Haller, of Berne; J. von Müller, of Schaffhausen; and, above all the sons of Zurich, the "Athens of German Switzerland," the Gessners, Lavater, Tschudi, Zimmermann, with Zchokke in our own days, give to that district quite a fair average of literary and scientific merit. But already on the borderland between Gaul and German, at Bâle (which now every year becomes more French), the Bernouillis and Euler are French in language; and it is unquestionable that to French Switzerland belong those few really great Swiss names which stamp themselves upon their age, the Rousseaus, De Staels, Guizots. Romanism, moreover, continued to cling to the rock-summits of German Switzerland, harbouring with it ignorance and intellectual torpor, at the

very heart of the old Teutonic nucleus of the land. And thus it came to pass, as I said, that wherever Swiss individualism had to speak out before Europe, it did so mainly in French.

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Conversely again, we need not be surprised to find that if there be one character which distinguishes SwissFrench literature and science, it is precisely this individualism. Here we find ourselves dealing with men who think for themselves. Their very mediocrity becomes thus original by the force of circumstances. Was there ever heavier writer, a more mediocre thinker than Necker? And yet that Genevese banker, standing in his plebeian respectability amid the brilliant French court, daring to declare, in an age of prodigality and insolvency, that economy is a public duty, that it is the business of kings to rule for the good of their subjects, has an originality which it is impossible to mistake in contemporary pictures, and becomes thereby for a time the very idol of a nation. Dumont is not a man of very great genius; but he has the originality to discover Bentham, who for twenty years perhaps is scarcely known except in Dumont's paraphrases.

These Swiss-French have thus, in the modern history of France herself, an importance which no impartial observer should overlook. They represent that principle of individualism which the French Reformation tended perhaps unduly to develop, which generations of despotism, from Richelieu downwards, took every pains to trample out. The type-man of them all,-the man whose value we Englishmen are least apt to appreciate, is Rousseau. What is Rousseau's essential function in the eighteenth century? Above all, to stand up against that last despot whom a Frenchman will yet obey, when he has cast off every other yoke,-King Wit, then lording it over Europe under the name of Voltaire. I know of no greater marvel in history than the influence of Rousseau. In an essentially spirituel age, without a particle of esprit, -in an essentially courtly age, a mere

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