The logical bent of the French mind, its love of rule, the elaborateness of its conventions in literature, its ceremonial observances dating from by-gone times, the custom of giving account of everything, of letting no nuance pass unchallenged or uncommented, have given it a power of expression and definiteness which holds together as a complete code of written and unwritten laws, and makes a perfect instrument of its kind.

But the very completeness of it has seemed to some writers a fetter, and when they revolt against and break through it, their extravagance passes beyond all ordinary bounds.

French represents the two extremes, unheard-of goodness, unequalled perfection, or indescribable badness and unrestraint.

Unfortunately the unrestraint is making its way, and as with ourselves in England, the magazine literature in France grows more and more undesirable.
Yet there is unlimited room for reading, and for Catholics a great choice of what is excellent.

The modern manner of writing the lives of the Saints has been very successfully cultivated of late years in France, making them living human beings "interesting as fiction," to use an accepted standard of measurement, more appealingly credible and more imitable than those older works in which they walked remote from the life of to-day, angelic rather than human.