LITERARY GOSSIP.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 1951, 6 April 1875, Page 4

LITERARY GOSSIP.

Mr Egger draws attention to tke documents which have served, to write the history of ancient Greece. There were two families of historians in ancient; one, learned and compiling from facts and documents ; the other, orators and philosophers. It is the second family that contributes the richest materials, and in the case of Herodatus and Thucidides, the most complete. Now, modern Greek historians like Grate and Duruy, differ from the ancient, in not only being more complete, but more accurate, because they have gleaned their materials from engravings on stone or metal, discovered embedded in the sioil of the East. Whilst the most ancient manuscript of Thucidides passed through the hands of twenty successive copyists, there was no intermediary between the workman who carved a decree, a contract, or an epitaph, and the authorised person who superintended the work. Such as museums possess these debris of history to-day, such they existed two thousand years ago. This is the contact of men with antiquity. We have printing now, but the ancients had engravings on bronze and stone, from laws and official documents and treaties, down to private contracts and accounts. The Athenians have been accused of legerity in their conduct, and inconstancy in their discourses, but M. Egger shows that none were more exact, more scrupulous, and more ingenious in casting up and keeping accounts. Among the epitaphs in honor of the soldiers who fell at Patidcea, there is one setting forth— " Ether (or Heaven) receives their soul, and the earth their body." Contemporary with the teachings of Socrates, this is no timid expression of a belief in the immortality of the soul.

If literature be rejuvenated and renewed by history, the latter receives not the less the same services from literature, and becomes something more than a monologue of wars, negociations, battles, and treaties. It is thus that "Madame de SeVigne"s letters," form a veritable history of her time, and make known to us an entire Society, and that Society, too, under the reign of Louis XIV. By her correspondence, and by Saint-Simon's memoirs, the life of the Grand Monarch is made familiar'to us, Voltaire shows only the bright side of that King's reign j Mme., fde Sevigne its reverse, tells of the thousands of lives sacrificed in building the Palace of Versailles, and carts laden with dead, which nightly carried away the corpses, and of the nation weeping for its sons slain in " glorious " wars. Louis XIV. was right, when, in dying, he said to the young Dauphin: "My child, do not imitate me either in my taste for buildings or for wars." It is thus that the letters of a mother are better testimony than the brilliant pictures of Voltaire, and that the truth about Bassuet's "superb triumphers" is better known than when chronicled by courtisans, of glory. M. Feugere says truly, we cannot read Mme. de Sevigne's letters too much, where we find the impression of the moment, the spontaneous cry of society results, that arranged memoirs do not produce. Then the authoress was a person of character, eminently curious to comprehend and feel everything, and succeeding in both. Books, sermons, theatres, sosgs, and events occupied her attention; she aimed to know everything behind the scenes, and she liked not to keep her news to herself—all must Ije communicated to her daughter. Correspondence in Mme. de Sevigne's time replaced newspapers, which did nofc, it may be said, then exist. There was, of course, the official gazette; its importance may be estimated from the fact, that the Voisin poisoning case, where courtiers were implicated, lasted three years and was never mentioned in it,, Sheets of manuscript news, however, circulated as in ancient Borne, from, band to hand. That, Colbert! vainly endeavored to suppress, and that the journal to-day supersedes; to-day, also, we nave only time for business letters, and telegrams, and the epistolary, style of Mme. de Sevige*Be is now killed between the newspaper and the card post. In her time letter writing was a necessity, and became a kind of continued conversation. In the contagious period in which the lived she ever remained above suspicion. She has been compared to La Fontaine, and rightly so; both had a lively and prompt facility for being impressedVith things, rendering them fresh, animated and striking, by a few true and expressive touches, without effort, but Tivaeious^and imaginative, with a " trotting pen," and making a captivating, picture out of an ordinary event. She was as entertaining as Mme. Scarron, who supplied dishes at her table by her her stories and wit, and of whom it was said, her butler would whisper in her ear at the dinner table: " another story, madame, if you please, we have no roast to-day."—Paris Correspondent.