In speaking of the vicious portions of the middle ranks, M. Frégier confines himself to the writers, or copying-clerks, the students, and the shopmen: all the other divisions of society have their tainted spots, but it is in the three which he has selected, more than in any other, that vice shows itself in a special, distinct, and extended form.

The number of persons who gain their bread by the use of the pen, in public offices, banking-houses, law-establishments, and elsewhere, amounts, in Paris, to many thousands: these, taken as a whole, are not more immoral than the rest of society; nor is it of these that our author speaks, but of the persons employed by the master-copyists, whose trade it is to prepare writings for attorneys, notaries, and the public generally :—

'There are about 150 such establishments in Paris, and the number of clerks employed in them exceeds 600. Most of the offices or stalls in which the business is carried on are slight and temporary erections in some of the busiest streets, and around and within the Palais de Justice. Among these clerks indolence and reckless and brutal vice are carried to a point to which it is difficult to conceive that human beings possessed of some degree of talent and education could descend. The master-copyists give to their writers two-thirds of the sums they receive. The set attached to each establishment is classed by numbers, so that the four or five highest on the list are sure of employment. Their weekly gains range from eight to fifteen francs; but the more skilful, and especially those who write a fine hand, can gain forty francs. Some of these men work in the stalls of their employers, others at their own abodes. The class, with some few melancholy exceptions of ingenious and well-educated young men and meritorious fathers of families, who have been driven into it by poverty, is a vile compound of expelled students, dismissed merchants' clerks, bankrupt schoolmasters, cashiered officers, and liberated convicts. Their predominant vices are drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, and idleness; the whole accompanied and set off by a degree of filthiness and disregard of the decencies of life which almost surpasses belief. It was from this crowd that Lacénaire stepped forth, eminent alike for his crimes and his excesses. The favourite pursuits of this "felon wit" were gambling and gluttony; all that escaped the one was lavished on the other. Eight or ten francs for his breakfast or dinner were no uncommon expenditure with this man; and his consumption of coffee was unbounded. Fraud and robbery were his most usual modes of obtaining funds for these indulgences; and it was only at intervals that he would condescend to have recourse to his pen. Before he had entirely shaken off all social restraint, and had devoted himself, soul and body, to crimes of the deepest dye, he was much sought after by the master-copyists, in consequence of the beauty of his penmanship and his marvellous rapidity of execution. Sometimes,

tempted by the high rate of payment offered him, he would undertake a long piece of writing, and labour at it, fixed at his desk, for twentyfour or even forty-eight hours, almost without intermission. His

task

task was no sooner finished than the gambling-table, or a glorious champagne breakfast, again rendered him penniless. Lacénaire scorned to be called a copyist; he only condescended to use his pen in moments of pressing need, when no robbery offered him an easier mode of filling his purse.

Many of these men are remarkable for the ragged and offensive dirtiness of their dress. The soiled rags of the beggar are displeasing to the "nicer sense ;" but the humble and careworn appearance of him who wears them converts disgust into pity. It is far otherwise with the class of which I am speaking: their insolent and boisterous manner, their sensual look, and their brutal filthiness, combine to render them the most revolting objects that the eye can meet; and, strange as it may appear, some of the most skilful of the class are of this description. Others, again, carry the vice of idleness to a pitch scarcely to be believed. Men, who could with ease obtain twenty or thirty sous a day, prefer to yawn away their time, and just cover a sufficient number of pages to keep themselves from sheer starvation. Doing nothing is their supreme happiness; a dry crust and water for their breakfast, a dinner for four sous, and a night's lodging for still less, suffice them. The rags worn by these men are actually infectious; nor do they attempt to replace them by others until they will no longer hold together. They will then apply for work at some of the stalls where they are known, gain a few francs, refit themselves in a set of better rags, and sink back at once into their state of torpid slothfulness. The master-copiers, utterly as they despise these men, are careful not to offend them, as in the moments of pressure which frequently occur in their business they cannot do without them. This class, viewed collectively, is one of the most degraded in Paris.'

We appreciate the immense advantage of late given to heads of families resident in London, from the institution of superior seminaries, where their sons may be trained by able masters during certain hours of each day, returning to spend the evening under the paternal eye and roof; but we are sure that, except as to medical studies, which cannot now be adequately prosecuted in small places-where there are of course no great hospitals, and where eminent surgeons can seldom be expected to fix themselves -young men whose parents live in the country should never be exposed to the danger of education in a populous metropolis. Paris is the great focus of all education for the youth of France; and the consequences in respect of morality are most painful to contemplate. M. Frégier gives some pleasing sketches of the students from the provinces: their warmth of friendship, their close union among themselves as a distinct class, their kind offices to each other in the hour of need, and the energy with which, after having yielded to the seduction of pleasure, they again devote themselves to study. But a much darker picture follows. All the facilities to vice surround these young men. Women, gam

bling, extravagance in all its shapes, tempt them at every hour; and, new as they are to the world, separated perhaps for the first time from their parents, frequent are the instances, not merely of a temporary falling away from virtue, but of utter ruin. M. Frégier traces out their progress from extravagance to dishonesty. When they have no longer trinkets or clothes of their own to pawn, they borrow those of their companions; they order others from the tradespeople, and all alike travel to the Mont de Piété. Again and again funds are asked to meet fictitious booksellers' and doctors' bills, until the parent's anxiety is aroused, and he resolves to ascertain the real state of things. All manner of frauds are then got up to establish the fact of sickness; and a due number of books are hired for the probable duration of the parental visit: a regular train of deception and falsehood is put into action, and the bewildered senior returns to the country, half satisfied and half suspicious. These delinquencies lead on to darker. Among the students there never fail to be found individuals who affect to separate themselves from the rest of the world, and to disdain all moral restraints. These young men, frequently of high talent, are quarrelsome, enemies to all fagging, perpetual frequenters of the coffeehouses, and pride themselves on their cynicism, and the open boldness of their vices. Their number is small; but, unhappily, one of their chief pleasures and pursuits is the propagation of their own vicious habits and opinions amongst the incautious youths around them. To complete the ruin of these striplings, and at the same time to prey upon them, is their aim and their boast. It is among these abandoned parasites and their victims that nearly all the cases occur of students who are brought before the tribunals of justice.

The shopmen form another distinct division of society. There is less of close fellowship among them than among the students, less esprit de corps. The ruling vices are the same; but the order of their intensity is reversed. With the student it is gambling, women, dress with the shopman dress is the supreme good, women and gambling are subordinate. The employment of these young men, especially of those who serve behind the counter, renders attention to their personal appearance a matter of importance, nay, of necessity. With many this grows into a passion, and leads them into expenses totally disproportioned to their narrow salaries. Petty abstractions from the goods under their care, especially articles of male attire, are then had recourse to; and these in the larger houses very often escape detection. Impunity renders the culprit bolder; the thefts become gradually more important, the appearance of the youth more splendid. He becomes the subject of conversation to his fellowshopmen:

shopmen: the thoughtless laugh, the grave shake their heads; and the suspicion reaches the master of the establishment, by whom this species of domestic robbery is considered as one of the chief dangers of his trade, one which it is most important he should detect and punish. Little investigation takes place, little opportunity for defence is given. It is held to be the safest plan to dismiss the fine gentleman, and he is thrown upon the world without character and without resource-how rarely to escape from the gulf of crime which yawns to receive him!

An additional danger besets those young denizens of the counter who are cursed with the fatal gift of beauty. Kept mistresses, ladies'-maids, nursery-maids, and all the descending gradations of frailty which crowd the entre-sol and the kitchen, select these handsome shopmen as the objects of their especial tenderness: they are led to do so partly by inclination, partly from a calculating determination to obtain by their means the materials for their toilets, without the disagreeable necessity of paying for them. 'A tall, well-made, silkmercer's apprentice, with bright eyes, fresh complexion, white teeth, elaborately-parted hair, and redundant whiskers, stands on the verge of a precipice every yard of ribbon that he measures. If he ventures on mustachios, and cherishes a tip, his doom is fixed. In these cases two brilliant wardrobes are to be furnished instead of one, and the descent to crime and ruin is more than doubly rapid.'

Our author, having indicated what he conceives to be the chief sources of aliment to crime, now enters upon the more direct and immediate subject of his investigation,—the dangerous class itself, its habits, and the causes of its depravity. He commences by an able sketch of the Moral Topography of Paris.' Through this we have no space to follow him; nor is it necessary. The habits

of a savage animal are of more importance than its locality. One of the chief haunts of the dangerous class is the quarter of the City it may be taken as a specimen of the whole. Its dark, dirty, and narrow streets are formed of lofty and many-storied houses, the gloomy entries to which are seldom guarded by a porter. These are crammed with prostitutes, vagabonds, and the more hardened class of criminals. The lodging-houses in

*The English reader will be reminded of some vivid sketches of London shop-life in the remarkable novel of Ten Thousand a Year.' Those sketches are indeed excellent; but it is in the portraitures of the attorney class that Mr. Warren has displayed the full strength and variety of his talents and his observation. His work deserves far more than a passing note-it appears to us superior to any other novel of familiar life recently produced in this country; we even think he might have secured for it a permanent place among our classics of prose fiction, if he had, in revising it for separate publication, struck out a large half of his sentimental details, and the whole of his temporary politics.

which this vile population dwells, are intermixed with numerous eating-houses and brandy and smoking shops of the most obscene description.

'The most striking characteristic of the lodging-houses is an excess of uncleanliness, which renders them so many centres of infection. It is only the most select which have beds; the greater part contain merely truckle bedsteads, disgustingly dirty. The rooms open into passages which have neither light nor air; the leaden sinks and latrines on each floor exhale a suffocating stench; their leakage extends from the garret to the ground-floor, and renders the stairs, which are covered with a humid mud, almost impassable. The court-yard of these houses is only a few feet square; and the windows of the densely-crowded rooms look into this; but many of the smaller chambers have no other opening than the door which leads to the stairs. The windows are covered with oiled paper instead of glass; and in many houses the whole of the inmates sleep on heaps of rags, collected in the streets, and kept in one of the lower rooms, to be given out to the lodgers as they enter. I enlarge upon these details, because the very harshness of the picture will throw a strong light on the habits of the dangerous class.'

"Gamblers-for it is with this class of criminals that our author commences are, from the very nature of their pursuits, subject to such sudden vicissitudes of fortune, and are driven on by such a reckless ardour, that they are not only looked upon by the police as dangerous persons, but become objects of dread to all the well-disposed. Of all our evil propensities, the love of play is the most tyrannical, devouring, and tenacious; and there are no excesses to which it does not lead. Among the professed gamblers there are many, especially of the lower and of the educated but necessitous classes, who are solely occupied by the craving appetite for play, the activity of which absorbs in them all other wants. They retrench as much as possible their food and clothing, to furnish the means of indulging this deadly passion. They frequent the lowest lodging-houses; and whilst they risk at the gaming-table every franc they possess, it is with regret that they part with two or three sous to pay for a bed of rotten straw, or of rags covered with mud. Such is their destiny, day after day; and it brings them to the level of the robbers and cut-throats who inhabit the same dens. It is this community of abode, this close approach to criminals of the worst description, which so powerfully seconds the pernicious influences of the passion that controls them. Deprived by the cast of the die of their last crown, and urged to desperation, they throw themselves into the career of crime in the train of the robbers with whom they dwell. This extremity of guilt is sooner or later the fate of almost every gamester. These same men, who, when neither fraud nor luck has befriended them, can submit to every privation, give way to the wildest extravagance when the chance of the cards or an unexpected plunder has put them in funds. Followed unceasingly by the dread of being discovered and arrested by the police, they hasten to the gaming

table