A Man of other Days : Recollections of the Marquis
Henry Joseph, Costa de Beauregard. Edited from the French by Charlotte M. Yonge.. (Hurst and Blaekett.)—This is an interesting book, though a stiff, un- graeeful translation. Miss Yonge claims to have expended upon it "an unusual amount of time and pains," but she has allowed many awkward- nooses and some errors on the part of the translator to escape supervi- sion. She should not, for instance, have allowed the Marquis to be represented as writing to his wife, "We are horribly miserable," whom it is plain from the context that the English equivalent of his meaning is, "We are exceedingly poor ;" and she should have suppressed so clumsy a sentence s the
following, especially as it purports to be a a
rendering of one of Chateaubriand's sayings :—" To dwell on things of the past is a sweet mania,—everything is pleasant, especially when re n life. eyes are turned on the early years of cherished friends, A is thus lengthened out, our feelings of affection are drawn out, and extended to days before our ken ; we adorn the past from the present, and we compose our friends." "A sweet mania" and to "compose our friends" are quite ingeniously " vile "phrases. The original work is, no. doubt, a good specimen of the French-memoir elass,—probably a little too sentimental, though that effect is brought out displeasingly in the Eng- lish version rather by the baldness of the translation than in exaggeration of fooling—and it possesses the attraction of a number of letters written to. the Marquis by Joseph le Maistro, The book is the history of a Sa voyard family during the troubles entailed on the little Duchy of Savoy by the diet French revolution and the subsequent invasions. The patriarchal home of the mountaineer noble is interesting to read about, and the character of the Marquis de Beauregard is attractive in its old- fashioned stateliness.
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