transfer the green to the background of the picture, and all is seen against a violet sky. The whole landscape is lifted and warmed and heightened by the brilliant sun and the unconquerable red of the earth. The effect is Italian in color, with a wide remove in spirit, finish, people, crops, and density of population. One wonders whether, in time to come, these hills will be buttressed by stone walls against the rapid destruction of the streams, as in Italy. Each year sees great advances. Better houses are built, the roads improved, the burden of debt grows lighter for the hardworking landowner, as methods and the resulting crops develop. Schools increase in number and excellence. The opportunities are legion, perhaps part of the appeal of the country lies in the possibilities which lie so ready to hand.

The wild plums, a drift of snowy whiteness by the roadside, were the first trees to bloom, with the pink peach haze a close second. By every cabin, in the hollows where a chance seed has fallen, in orchards and about the poorer houses, their rosy glow shows sharp against the whitewashed fences and the red clay soil. Towards night, as we drive back to the town, the blue wood smoke curls up from the chimneys, so absurdly big for the small houses, and we almost catch the fragrance of the frying bacon so sure to be a part of the cotter's evening meal.

The arbutus was pink and fragrant in February, and in March we found the clasping leaves of the blood-root. The woods are not like the woods of New England, but it was amazing to see how many of our Massachusetts friends among the flowers had found a hospitable welcome and a happy home on the southern slopes of the Alleghanies. Anemones and hepaticas, the sweet little wild iris with its golden eye, violets in profusion, phlox and armeria, the fragrant mitchella, and when summer was almost here, the kalmia in radiant masses. We missed the patches of sturdy adder's tongue, and the wake-robin, Jack-in-the-pulpit preached not, and there were no beeches to shelter the Dutchman's breeches. But there were broad spaces covered with the lavender birds' foot violet, the halesia shook its silver bells above our heads, and we made the acquaintance of the rare lonicera flava. We were told of many other northern plants to be found fifty miles away, over the first ridge of the mountains on the horizon. When the Appalachian forest reserve is a reality instead

of a hope, there is no doubt that it will prove a safe harbor for a wonderfully large and varied flora. 'Twill be a happy huntingground for many an enthusiastic botanist.

The long streamers of the Banksia roses were studded with little yellow rosettes when we drove through the sunny street for the last time. The wistaria's mauve panicles had faded and seemed to bloom again less gracefully as pyramids on the paulonias when our southern winter ended. We rode away to find snow-froth and chilly airs, the rush of the workaday world, and our own almost forgotten duties awaiting us.

Some years ago a writer in the Evening Post suggested that no one be allowed to write on Southern topics until he had passed three months on the ground. We had passed the required three months in the Carolinas-were we prepared to give our views on the race question, or to formulate plans for the regulation of child labor? Not once had these knotty problems troubled our peace. We had seen happy healthy children playing in mill villages, we had encountered many shades and types of colored people without feeling any desire to defend their helplessness against the tyrannies of the paler race. We had met one more illustration of the fact that it is easy to settle other people's difficulties at a distance. What had B― asked of us? Nothing. What had she given us? Glimpses of happy, contented, useful, unquestioning lives, flowers and sunshine, soft airs and gentle speech. The Spirit of Place had revealed itself to us, and proved a more sympathetic companion than the repatriated American, as we gazed for the last time on the awakening earth. The winter barrenness was gone from the fields, and on every side we saw the awkward mules turning furrows under the guidance of their cheerful dusky drivers. Unwillingly we felt the darkness closing over our last view of the Southland. How longingly we gazed on the pines and the curving terraces! "Tout comprendre est tout pardonner"-no longer did the unfinished fields look neglected, not now would we criticise the unpretentious, roughly built houses. The plainness spoke to us now of struggles against poverty, of effort, of hard labor to bring to maturity a difficult crop. Surely the struggle and labor and effort, with the qualities which make them possible, will make these lands still more attractive and lovable in the years to come.

"Tom Jones" in France

BY WARREN BARTON BLAKE

Mr. Thomas Seccombe has called comparative literature “that infant Hercules." Yet comparative literature is as apt to see snakes as to strangle them. Certainly the best contributions in the new field-though it is the name, and not the field, that's new-have come to us from France. It is in France, precisely, that there is least advertisement by the workers, and the best work done. Almost fifteen years have passed since the publication of the late Professor Texte's Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme Littéraire; and, though errors have been pointed out by Professor Vreeland and others, the book remains singularly stimulating in its generalizations. It is Texte's book, one remembers, that makes so much of Richardson's importance in continental literature. If Richardson has meant so much to France-how much, is one of the commonplaces of criticism—where, one may ask (in echoing Brunetière's question), "Where is the influence of Fielding on the French novel of the eighteenth century?" Is Mr. Millar right in saying that Richardson's virile contemporary was a "barren rascal," in so far as influence upon his neighbors was concerned?

Fielding has been read by few Frenchmen of our own generation, students of English literature apart; and never thoroughly appreciated by the French public of any period,-that much is certain. The reader of literary correspondence will find occasional echoes of readings in Fielding; but these chance allusions sink into insignificance when we consider the greater familiarity with Richardson's heroes and heroines: first of all, naturally, with the "divine" Clarissa. And there is the same familiarity with one, at least, of Sterne's works. The "Sentimental Journey" is a book read and re-read in France for the pure pleasure of it. One wonders whether, had it been composed originally by the author of Manon Lescaut, English translations could have fared half so well. Might it not have been objected, specifically: "It is so-so very French!" One hardly agrees that the "Journey" is really French in its inspiration; yet it is French enough to have sug

gested, in my hypothetical conditions, the criticism just phrased: French enough, also, to have been the starting point of that delicious Voyage Autour de ma Chambre. Mr. Charles Sears Baldwin has recently published an essay wherein he enumerates, all in cautioning us against supposing the influence as deep as it was extensive, some of those who owe their debt to Sterne: Mlle. de Lespinasse; Diderot; Gautier; most of all, de Maistre. Mr. Baldwin has nothing to say of Charles Nodier and his Histoire du Roi de Boheme, etc., etc., where the traces of Sterne are unmistakable (notwithstanding the fact that Werther has lived and died in the interval); and perhaps it was hardly worth his while to note that Gérard de Nerval won the name, at least, of the Sterne français. The point is, not that Sterne profoundly modified the character of French literature, or even Balzac's father's ("in his philosophy, his originality, his bounty, my Uncle Toby all over again"), but rather that he was adopted once for all into the family of authors for the French. If, in the circumstances, his impress upon French literature has been less deep than his predecessor's-than Richardson's, that is-we may attribute the fact to his product's being so infinitely more final, expressing the culmination of a literary movement. As for Richardson, who was glorified by one new generation after another, from Diderot to Musset and Balzac, he used a sentimentalism scarcely less extravagant than Sterne's, -a sentimentalism answering certain pressing requirements of his age, and after; he was, moreover, rendered into good French by the Abbé Prévost. Fielding had his vogue, too, in that day when, as Collé said, "as for novels, no one will touch them unless they are translations from the English;" he was enjoyed above all the other novelists by Madame du Deffand, and ranked above them all by the professional critics; he seems, withal, not to have had his influence. "No one has tried to imitate Fielding," La Harpe wrote in his Lycée; "like Molière, he has remained alone in his class."

II.

Certainly a sufficient number of editions of Fielding were issued in France: the bibliography is a larger matter than has been

suspected.* The "Julian," even, was included in more than one edition of the novelist's works, as, also, in independent editions and in collections based on other considerations than authorship: thus at Amsterdam and Paris, 1768; at Paris, 1771; at Geneva, 1782; in a series of Voyages imaginaires, Songes, Visions et Romans cabalistiques (1787), where "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Sentimental Journey" were its shelf-companions; in editions of 1784 (Reims), 1797, and 1804. I have sketched the fortunes of this book abroad chiefly because "Julian the Apostate" seems to me one of Fielding's productions that France could well enough have done without. The other works were, of course, much more popular: with the exception of "Jonathan Wild," which was always rather a drug upon the market. And if the less distinguished among Fielding's works were promptly translated and generally

*"Tom Jones," appearing in English in 1749, was issued in the French translation of La Place, abridged, in four volumes, London and Paris, 1750. The third edition appeared the year after. It is impossible to state how many times this miserable translation was reprinted: the title-page of the fourth edition seems to have been used for issue after issue. One may note reprintings: Amsterdam (2 vols.), 1750; London and Paris (Nyon), 1767; same, (Bauche), 1777; Paris (Imbert), 1801; no less than three Paris editions in 1823; the Cazin edition at Reims, 1784 (5 vols.); the Paris edition of 1797 (Perlet); the reprint in the Geneva collection of Meilleurs Romans (3 vols.), 1782; the reprint in La Place's Romans et Contes imites de l'Anglois, 1788; the Didot edition, 1784; finally, reprints of the same translations as late as 1823, 1832, and 1834,-as well as in the edition of Euvres Completes of Paris, 1804. La Place was the basis of the Italian translation in two volumes, Venice, 1756. In 1784 the Comte d'Artois included "Tom Jones" among the books he had specially printed on vellum (4 vols.): a copy of this edition is found at the British Museum.

Davaux's more complete translation appeared at Paris, 1796, and was reprinted in 1798: each time in four volumes. The Cheron translation, 1804, six volumes, is considered the most exact rendering. Defauconpret's translation, preceded by Scott's essay, appeared in 1833; 1836; 1839:-each time in two volumes. The Comte de la Bedoyere's translation (Didot: 4 vols.), 1833, has been found more faithful than La Place, better composed than Cheron. Cheron's version was, indeed, only a retouching of the translation in three volumes in the Collection Dauthereau, 1828. De Wailly's translation, with Scott's essay, was published Paris, 1841. The colorless Tom Jones des Enfants, by Bertin, appeared in one volume, 1812. There is no opportunity to speak here of the amusing operettas, etc., founded upon the novel.

+Twenty years after the book's appearance in English, it was issued in two volumes by the bookseller Duchesne (1763): the translator being Christian Picquet, censeur royal. I discover no independent reprint prior to the year 1833: though "Wild" had been included in the Geneva Bibliotheque des meilleurs romans anglois (1781), in the Reims edition of 1784; and in Paris editions of 1797 and 1804. In Grimm's "Correspondence" one may read that "Wild" is insipid and tiresome: "You will not count this novel among the celebrated author's best works." It was its "bad taste" that Freron alleged against it.