hundred and twenty-one, to not quite seventeen
ounces per head in eighteen hundred
and fifty-one. This has taken place concurrently
with a decided decrease in the use of
ardent spirits; and it is worthy of note that
Lane, the annotator of the Arabian Nights,
and Layard, the explorer of Assyria, state, as
the result of their observations, "that the
growth of the use of tobacco amongst oriental
nations has gradually reduced the resort to
intoxicating beverages."

FRENCH LOVE.

I HAVE seen a French lover. I have even
watched the process of French love-making,
and traced the course of an affaire from its
birth to its decay. Which thing hath not
been given to every Anglo-Saxon. It was a
curious study; almost worth a woman's
heart-ache to master. So at least I, not being
the sufferer, felt during this psychological
experience. Harriet was probably of a
different opinion; for few like to learn
pathology by their own ailments, or to study
human nature by their own sufferings.

A French love affair is the most scientific
matter in the world. It can be reduced to as
positive rules as an Aristotelian drama, and
follows as certain a course of progressive
development as an historical essay or a three-
volumed novel. It has a beginning, a middle,
and an end, all distinctly planned and foreseen;
and combinations of feelings and circumstances
are previsionally arranged and
deliberately " played for," as if a love affair
were a game of chess, where all was science
and nothing chance. Consequently it is not
impulsive in its action, like a Spanish, or
even an English, matter of the kind; it is
purely mathematical, and requires as keen an
intellect to manage properly as the conduct of
an army or the leadership of a party.

No French lover who understands what he
is about is precipitate. He is as deliberate
and cautious in love as he is passionate and
inconsequential in politics. The man who
wouM organise a revolution because he disapproved
of the court liveries, would spend
months in planning the surprise of certain
minute evidences of interest which an Anglo-
Saxon would demand bluntly in a few days,
and think very little of when obtained. A
faded rose, a crumpled ribbon, exalts a
Frenchman into the highest realms of
bliss. To see him with such a token in his
possession, one would believe that he had
attained the extreme point of human happiness,
and that nothing now was left to fate or
the future. And it is so. His opening has
given him the game. An Englishman would
neither feel such security nor show such rapture
if all the preliminaries had been signed,
and mammas and aunts were "agreeable;" for
we are generally chary of our emotional expressions,
and few of us think love sufficient
cause for madness.

A Frenchman's love will live on food as
unsubstantial as the cameleon's. The colour
of his lady's hair will keep it in good condition
for a month; the perfume she affects, the
turn of her lip, the pink nail with its half-
moon, the delicate finger, her smile, and the
little foot so neat and shapely—nay, even the
ribbons she prefers, her shawl, and her bonnet
—will be as robust diet as it will need in the
earlier days of its existence. You will never
meet a French lover among the educated
classes, who has not made an artistic study
of his mistress, and who does not know
every line of her face, and every change
of her countenance. He would be only a
bungling journeyman else, incapable of all the
fine work of his profession. But this gives a
certain poetic charm to a woman's intercourse
with him, which few fail to appreciate; appealing
as it does to that vague sentiment
which all women possess, and the want of
which they so sadly complain of in men of
business and of actual life. Thus then the first
step in French love making is artistic admiration,
the profound knowledge of every personal
peculiarity sliding into the respectful adoration
of a devotee, and the spiritual appreciation
of a poet. It is a long slow step, but sure
and irremovable. Every day sees the smallest
possible advance in his suit; but every day is
an advance. As nothing is left to chance, the
progress of each week is mapped out months
ago; and what he will have dared, and
what obtained, by such and such a time, is
as definitely arranged as the manoeuvres of a
squadron. He seldom deceives himself; and
seldomer fails by undue familiarity. His
lady-love is a saint that he worships Chinese
fashion—kneeling, but ever advancing nearer
to her shrine; the means of humility giving
him the end of success. He instals her like a
goddess that he may reverence while conquering.
He makes her feel that to understand her
aright is his business; that he has not a thought
nor a wish distinct from her; that her happiness
is the one unfailing endeavour of his life;
her love the one adored hope of his heart.
Absent, his every thought belongs to her;
present, his whole being is merged and
fused into hers. He becomes her own best
interpreter to herself; for these lovers
are wonderful readers of character—with
perceptive faculties almost like clairvoyance.
Not a glance but he reads and
replies to; not a smile but has its meaning,
such as she herself perhaps did not
half understand; not a word but receives its
amplification and the revealing of its mysterious
import. He impresses on her that he
reads the hidden secrets of her heart and
brain, and that, to be understood in half her
beauty, she must be interpreted by him. And,
as no woman lives on this earth who, at
some time of her life, does not think herself
(if she thinks at all), misunderstood and
unappreciated as no woman was before
her, this peculiar tact and power of the