A history of _Marie Stuart_, by I. M. Dargaud, has just been published in Paris, and for its brilliancy, completeness, clearness, and impartiality, attracts much attention. Queen Mary of Scotland was one of the famously beautiful women whose history is romance. She must be named with the heroines of history and the figures of poetry, with Helen, and Aspasia, and Cleopatra. Certainly, we trace no more sparkling and sorrowful career than hers upon the confused page of history, and our admiration, condemnation, surprise, sorrow and delight, fall, summed in a tear, upon her grave. In this work it appears that she was undoubtedly privy to the death of Darnley. During his assassination, she was dancing at Holyrood. The fearful fascination of a brigand like Bothwell, for so proud and passionate a nature as Mary's, is well explained by M. Dargaud. He is just, also, to her own tragedy, the long and bitter suffering, the betrayal of friends; the final despair, and the laying aside two crowns to mount the scaffold. She died nobly, and as most of the illustrious victims of history have died; as if nature, unwilling that they should live, would yet compassionately show the world in their ending, that heroism and nobility were not altogether unknown to them.
_Apropos_ of this history of Queen Mary, Lamartine has written a letter to Beranger, which praises the work exceedingly, but much more glorifies himself. The letter is a perfect specimen of that vanity, wherein only Lamartine is sublime: "Ah! if you or I had had such a heroine at twenty years, what epic poems and what songs would have been the result!"
THE COUNT MONTALEMBERT, the fervid champion of Catholicism in the French chamber, has just published a work, entitled _The higher and lower Radicalism: in its enmity to Religion, Right, Freedom and Justice, in France, Switzerland and Italy_.
Although M. GUIZOT appears to be as busily engaged as ever in politics, the advertisements of the booksellers would induce a belief that his whole attention is given to literary studies. He has just published _Etudes Biographiques sur la Révolution de l'Angleterre_, which, with his sketch of General Monk, he says, "form a sort of gallery of portraits of the English Revolution, in which personages of the most different characters appear together--chiefs or champions of sects or parties, parliamentarians, cavaliers, republicans, levellers, who, either at the end of the political conflicts in which they were engaged, or when in retirement towards the close of their lives, resolved to describe themselves, their own times, and the part they played therein. In the drawing together of such men," he adds, "and in the mixture of truth and vanity which characterize such works, there is, if I do not deceive myself, sufficient to interest persons of serious and curious minds, especially among us and in these times; for in spite of the profound diversity of manners, contemporary comparisons and applications will present themselves at every step, whatever may be the pains taken not to seek them." The studies here collected we suppose are not new; they are doubtless the articles which the author contributed to the _Biographie Universelle_ and other works before he became a minister--perhaps, as in the cases of his "Monk" and "Washington," with scarcely a word of alteration. The work is, however, interesting. The period of English history to which it refers has been profoundly studied by Guizot, and it would probably be impossible to select a mode of treating it that would admit of more effective or attractive delineation. The life of Ludlow appears as the first of the series.