as the others are treatises on bird nature and
insect nature. To which observation it is
replied that the critic makes a distinction
without a difference, for love is woman and
woman is love. Besides, such a title would
have compelled us to head our article
with MICHELET'S WOMAN, which, by
light-minded and evil-disposed persons, might
have been construed into an implied insult
(which we should be the last to offer)
to a grave and authoritative literary
personage.

Secondly, the critic remarks, that Love, or
Woman, as you will, runs, in some respects,
too much after the model of those useful and
practical farming books known as The Horse,
The Sheep, Cattle, The Pig, or even The
Canary Fancier's Guide, with rules how to
choose a good bird, the treatment of its
diseases, how to rear it and keep it in full
song, et cetera. That Love is made up of
three or four separate treatises which,
although each may be good of its kind, had
better have been published separately, if it
were necessary to publish them at all, which
may he doubted. That a work which
displays a knowledge of anatomy, ethics,
sentiment, social polity, and domestic medicine,
all at once, is as yet scarcely suited for the
generality of readers. That if some
strong-minded American lady-professor were to
handle love in the same literary way, she
would give us the physical and moral
characteristics of man, the right way to court,
accept, and marry him; how to keep him in
order without too glaringly hen-pecking him;
how to hen-peck him effectually in case of
need brought about by his rebellion; and
how to retain his amiability to the very last,
when he had become John Anderson her Jo.
But American advocates of the rights of
women are nonsuited at the very outset, as
we shall see.

There are books which take, on account of
the simple fact that their author dared to
write them. We may have thought the very
same thoughts ourselves; we may even have
uttered them in secret into some friendly and
confidential ear at a moment of heart-
expanesiveness; but we should never have dreamt
of putting them in print. L' Amour is one
of those bold challengers of fortune. A work
written with a high aim, whose object is to
prove and persuade that fidelity and morality
are happinesss, that luxurious superfluities,
so far from being conducive to real welfare,
are its most dangerous enemies: this work,
earnest, full of feeling, with many valuable
truths strikingly expressed, can scarcely be
laid in its entire state before a promiscuous
public of English readers.

Love is married life, conducted as religion
and ethics teach us that it ought to be.
Foolish flirtations are not love, nor are
criminal attachments; nor is polygamy,
legalised or illegal love. The Grand Seigneur
and his three-tailed bashaws know
nothing of love; nor does the cruel, heartless,
dissipated rake. Therefore would Michelet
write an Art of Love (in the good sense of
the word), which should be the first effectual
purifier of society; for family is based on
love, and society on family; love, therefore,
precedes all. A reform in love is more
needful than any other reform whatever.
Michelet's grand object is, moral enfranchisement
by means of veritable love.

From the commencement of the century,
people have been fully aware that the question
of love is the essential question which
shakes the very foundations of society.
Where that is fixed and powerful, everything
else is strong, solid, and productive. The
illustrious Utopians who have thrown vivid
light upon so many other subjects—upon
education, for instance—have not been so
happy in respect to the subject of love. They
have displayed but little independence of
spirit. Their theories, bold in form, are not
the less at bottom the slaves of present facts,
timidly chalked out on the manners of the
day. They found polygamy practically existing,
and they obeyed its dictates, by imagining
for the future polygamic Utopias. But,
without any great moral research, they might
have discovered the veritable law in this
matter by simply consulting history and
natural history.

In history, the races of man are strong,
both physically and morally, precisely in
proportion as their life is monogamous or
not. In natural history, the superior animals
tend towards a married life, and attain it at
least for a time. And it is, in great measure,
on that account that they are superior. It is
said that love, with animals, is changeable
and fickle; that such is their natural and
normal condition. You will observe,
nevertheless, that as soon as any degree of stability
becomes possible, and the means of livelihood
are certain and regular, there takes place
amongst them marriages which, at least, are
temporary, and which are induced not only
by the love of their progeny, but truly and
verily by love. In a Swiss household of
chaffinches, the female died; the male fell
into despair, and allowed the little ones to
perish. Evidently it was love and not paternal
affection which attached him to the nest.
When she was lost, all was lost. Scantiness
of food, as the autumn advances, compels
many species to dissolve their marriage.
The consorts are then forced to separate, in
spite of themselves, to extend the radius of
their explorations and chase, and they are
unable to rejoin each other at night. So
that their poverty and not their will
consents to a divorce. Otherwise, they would
remain together. It is not a mere amorous
caprice which unites them, but a really
social instinct, a desire for a life in common.
It is the delight which you feel at
having by your side, all day long, a gentle
soul which belongs to you, which reckons