Of the forty-three letters of Sealsfield here presented, twenty-five appear now for the first time. The remaining eighteen have already been published, but either in abridged form, or deviating greatly from an exact reproduction of the originals. The letters altogether include: I. Twenty to Frl. Elise Meyer; II. Five to Frl. Marie Meyer; III. Eighteen to Hrn. Heinrich Erhard. The earliest of these letters is dated September 1841; the greater number, however, were written after the author was already past the prime of life. Old age naturally intensifies human weaknesses, but like the setting sun, it also illumines the horizon of the past. Thus these letters written during our author's last years, illustrate something more than the eccentricities of an old man. Sealsfield's literary and social judgments, however carelessly thrown out,—his whole personality in fact,—concern not only the few who have devoted themselves to the study of Sealsfield, or who cherish his memory, but are calculated to interest as well that larger class in both hemispheres which still represents the extinct “citizen of the world,” the cosmopolitan who had learned to look beyond the fashions of his own time and country in politics and literature. In Sealsfield's home the memory of “Oesterreich's grösster Romanendichter” has recently been revived by the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of our author's birth. It is hoped that the present publication may be not unwelcome, as following opportunely in the wake of that event. Appended to these letters will be found a synopsis of the principal events of Seals-field's life, arranged in chronological order.

The fourteenth century was for England a period of storm and stress. The Saxon genius does not achieve its conqueste lightly; it does not march to victory with furled flags or muffled drums; it is profoundly conscious of its own effort and the object to be realized. True, it often attains more than it hopes or even knows; but it attains the larger result through the accomplishment of the immediate purpose. The internai struggles are those that cost, with nations as with men; and it is no small part of the greatness of England that she has been able to see and strong to resist those dangers whieh, rising from within, have threatened to overthrow that stability which outward foes have in vain assailed. In that century which marked the close of the middle ages and the beginning of the modem era, England was busy taking cities and ruling her own spirit, and only the wise knew which was the better.

In a recent doctor's dissertation of the University of Lausanne, P. Marchot examines the question of the pronunciation of the French nasal vowels ain, ein, and in during the xvi and xvii centuries, and cornes to some rather startling conclusions, principally with regard to the developmcnt of ain (and ein). He denies the possibility of the direct development of ãin > en. ‘Passe-t-on directement de ãin à en ? Absolument pas: phonétiquement l'évolution est impossible. C'est au xvie siècle que ãin, dénatalité en ayn, passe à eyn et ensuite à,’ (p. 49). It is this thesis which he attempts to prove on pp. 47–62 of his monograph. The whole argumentation is based on the material presented by Thurot, De la prononciation française, of whom he says (p. 47), ‘malheureusement, Thurot n'était pas un romaniste, et il est incontestable que plus d'une fois, il n'a pas su tirer des matériaux qu'il avait réunis tout le parti qu'il était possible d'en tirer.’ I think it is safe to say, that Marchot has not succeeded much better. To be sure, the history of these nasals is not an easy problem, the grammarians of the xvi and xvii centuries are in the highest degree obscure in their statements, and it is not an easy matter to arrive at a clear understanding of their meaning. The weak point in Marchot's method is, that he interprets the statements of these grammarians literally and that he seems to lose sight of the continuity of phonetic tendency, whereas the only safe method can be, to collate and compare all the statements to the point, to eliminate every thing that appears individual with each grammarian, and to interpret what remains, along lines that are demanded by our knowledge of the history of French nasalization in general, making due allowance, at the same time, for the ignorance of phonetic problems at that period, and the crude terminology then in vogue.