a question whether this generous spirit, half-sister, at least, to Charity, will remain under a roof in which the ideal is treated as uncivilly as Mérimée treated it. He was constantly in the Imperial train at Fontainebleau, Compiègne and Saint Cloud; but he does little save complain of the discomforts of grandeur in general and of silk tights in especial. He was, however, as the event proved, a sincere friend of the Emperor and Empress, and not a mere mercenary courtier. He always speaks kindly of them and sharply of every one else except Prince Bismarck, whom he meets at Biarritz and who takes his fancy greatly. The literature of the day he considers mere rubbish. Half a dozen of his illustrious contemporaries come in for hard knocks; but M. Renan and his paysages are his pet aversion. The manners of the day are in his opinion still worse and the universal world is making a prodigious fool of itself. The collapse of the Empire, in which he believed as much as he believed in anything, set the seal to his pessimism, and he died, most consentingly, as one may suppose, as the Germans were marching upon Paris. His effort had been to put as little as possible of his personal self into his published writings; but fortune and his correspondent have betrayed him, and after reading these letters we feel that we know him. This fact, added to their vigour, their vivacity and raciness,
