Less prolific, more unassuming, and far less universally known than the three authors at whose character and writings we have thus briefly glanced, Charles de Bernard need fear comparison with none of them. That he is faultless we do not assert; that he in great measure eschews the errors of his contemporaries, will be patent to all who peruse his pages. The objections that English readers will make to his books are to be traced to no aberrations of his, but to those of the society whose follies he so ably and wittily depicts. He faithfully sketches, and more often amusingly caricatures, the vices, foibles, and failings of French men and women. If those are to be delineated at all--and, with a view to their amendment, surely they may--the task could hardly be executed with a chaster and less offensive pencil. De Bernard paints immorality--it would be unjust to say that he encourages it. He neither deals in highly-coloured and meretricious scenes _à la_ Sue and Dumas; nor supports, with the diabolical talent and ingenuity of a Sand, the most subversive and anti-social doctrines. His works are not befouled with filth and obscenity, such as that impure old reprobate Paul de Kock delights and wallows in--or disgraced by the irreligion, and contempt of things holy, found in the writings of scores of French authors whom we could name, were they worth the naming. It is undeniable that the ingenious plots of his very entertaining books turn, for the most part, on matters difficult to touch upon with propriety, and which English writers usually avoid; frequently, for instance, on illicit passion and conjugal infidelity. And therefore many Englishmen, with whatever interest and amusement they themselves might read his volumes, would hesitate to recommend them to their sisters and daughters. Some few of his tales, especially of the shorter ones, are in all respects unexceptionable. We instance "La Peau du Lion," translated as "The Cossack's Grave;" and "L'Anneau d'Argent," which has also appeared in English. Gerfaut, one of this author's earliest works, and unquestionably his masterpiece, has little that can justly offend, although its translation met, we believe, a cold reception. The plot turns on an attachment between a married woman and the hero of the story. But if M. de Bernard falls readily enough into the easy, matter-of-course tone in which his countrymen habitually discuss amatory peccadilloes--and he could hardly have attained his present popularity in France had he assumed the prude--he does not disdain or neglect to point a moral after his own fashion. In administering a remedy, a wise physician has regard to the idiosyncrasy of the patient as well as to the nature of the disease. A nation whose morality is unhealthy, must not be treated like a sick horse, whose groom crams a ball down his throat, and holds his jaws together, and his head back, to prevent its rejection. The dose must be artfully disguised, wrapped in a sweetmeat, and the invalid will take it kindly, and sooner or later feel the benefit. We would fain discern, in some of M. de Bernard's books, under a perfumed envelope of palatable trifle, a tendency worthy of applause; a design to combat, by quiet and implied ridicule, the moral maladies of his country. It is not his wont, as with many of his competitors, to make the vicious interesting and the virtuous fools. His husbands are not invariably good-natured, helpless noodles, with whom, even in their direst calamities, the most right-thinking have difficulty to sympathise: the Lovelaces who pursue married women with their insidious and dangerous attentions, are not by him for ever exalted into heroes, redeeming their pleasant vices by a host of high and chivalrous qualities. On the contrary, the apparently easy-going husband often proves a smart fellow, and thorough Tartar--the brilliant lover an emancipated bagman, or contemptible _chevalier d'industrie_. Of this we have an example in "Le Gendre," in some respects one of the most objectionable of De Bernard's novels, certainly not well suited for a birth-day present to misses in their teens. A seemingly tame, insipid clown of a husband counteracts the base manoeuvres of a dashing Paris _roué_; and finally, after refusing to fight the would-be seducer, whom he has ascertained to be an arrant swindler, takes truncheon in hand, and belabours him in presence of his intended victim and of a roomful of company. But setting aside any moral tendency which goodwill towards such a vastly pleasant author as De Bernard may induce us, by the aid of our most complaisant spectacles, to discover in his writings, his gentlemanly tone is undeniable, his pictures of French life, especially in Paris, are beyond praise.