Francis I. and his Times. From the French of Clarissa
Coignet, by Fanny Twemlow. (Richard Bentley and Son.)—Admiration for the Francois Premier type of man has probably permanently injured the French character, and we are more in want of writers to expose its essential worthlessness than to belaud its superficial brilliancy. But this is hardly work for a lady. In her pages not only must vice lose half its evil by losing all its grossness ; it must practically disappear, even though the result be to leave the picture untrue to life. This is what has happened in Madame Coignet's case. She has given us a pleasingly written but rose- water narrative of Francis's reign. Decidedly the best portion of the book is that which is devoted to Marguerite of Navarre. The English translation reads easily, but contains some bad blunders. For instance, "He debased the magistracy by making all offices venial by his personal intervention in trials, and by passing sen- tences agreeable to himself," is a sentence which mistranslation and mispunctuation have reduced to absolute nonsense. For the absurdity of the following, author and translator are perhaps both to blame :—" Impetuous, bold, and boisterous, a generation was solidly constituted whose fund of genuine simplicity survived the springtide of life, and endowed all with a capacity for juvenile impulse and transports of adoration in mature age."
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