CLELIE. In (CIAlie) Madeleine de Scudery undertook to do for Parisian bourgeois society what she had done for the aristocratic pricieux in (Le Grand Cyrus.' The first volume of (Clelie) appeared in 1654, the tenth and last in 1660. Together they count over 8,000 pages. The scene opens 'in ancient Carthage, soon shifts to Capua and thence to Rome, but with out the least effort at historic detail. The heroine is the daughter of a Roman exiled by Tarquin, her lover a son of Lars Porsena. Much is said of Brutus, Tarquin, Lucretia, the last masquerading as a past-rnistress in pri cieuse coquetry, whose death leaves the reader as cold as it apparently did the author. The interest of (Clelie' is not in the story and never was, but in the 73 characters, each painted from life, each picturing some wealthy bour geois with aspirations to culture, some pri cieuse ridicule or perhaps some Madame Scar ron, with a few from higher spheres, among whom may be named Louis XIV (Alcandre), his finance minister, Fouquet (Cleomine) and Mlle. de Longueville (C16lie). What did most
to make 'Clete a sensation in its day, stamped it as a manual of gallantry, and has preserved its memory till ours, was its °Map of Tender land,° watered by the rivers of Inclination, Es teem and Gratitude, with many allegorized cities, many by-ways and false paths to places whose names suggest stages of ffirtation, ii frivolity, gallant and so on, with a Dangerous Sea and, beyon an ((unexplored land,10 the whole a sort o preliminary study for a psychological novel, not without ingenious onginality, though the general idea of an alle gorical map was old.