LA COQUETTERIE.
-Tux author of these volumes has quite mistaken his line : he might write a tour, or a volume of sketches of manners,but a work -of fiction requires higher powers of the imagination than he is ever likely to be master of. Here are all the elements of a tale, but the plastic soul is wanting to animate the whole. The remarks lie as dead commonplaces, and the incidents and characters have all the air of being transferred bodily from some other novel upon -" the English abroad." The second title, "Sketches of Society in France and Bel- gium," ought to be written with the addition of " the English ;" for France and Belgium might as well never have been, if they only exist as they are described here, in the persons of a few of their idlers, who for reasons of their own choose to frequent the company of the English on the Continent. The heroine and confessed favourite of the author is the Coquette- s French girl of English birth. We presume the writer intended to warn the sex against the vice of coquetry : if so, he should not have spent all his endeavours in making his coquette the most tolerable of his personages, and have contrived to show us none of her co- quetry, but a great deal of her accomplishments, amiability, and real disinterestedness. And, as if to crown coquetterie with the glory of sentimentality as well as the honours of wit and gayety, be kills her • she dies of excess of feeling—a pretty coquette ! It 'would seem that the feminine outcry against coquetterie had set him to work upon his subject, and that the true man had in the course of writing come to the lady's aid : for so it is, that men generally, so far from avoiding coquettes, flock about them, and by their neglect of others show their pre- ference. The author endeavours to extricate himself from this difficulty by a motto from Madame DE GENLIS,—" La coquetterie ? ce'st ce que les hommes meprisent, et ce que les attire.' This ap- pears very pretty ; but, like most other paradoxes of like pretti- ness, only wants explanation. Men are never attracted by what they despise—they love it, if it be only for a time. The truth is, men delight in the society of coquettes, for it is agreeable; co- quettes are what is called charming—that is, full of gayety, con- versation, and sparkling play of mind: but men are afraid of them as wives. The ungenerous scoundrels fear that the society of one man will never satisfy a person who evidently delights in the admiration of all. They are mistaken. The prejudice against co- quettes is entirely feminine, and smacks of all uncharitableness ; and the objection to them on the part of a marrying man—who turns from a gay, animated woman, fond of the social pleasures, and who is an ornament to them, to repose upon some sulky noodle —arises out of a moral cowardice, a shortsighted and baseless ap- prehension.
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