always in an orchestra-stall before the general stage, watching a lamplit performance—flaring gas in one case, the influence of his radiant fancy in the other. "Descriptive" writing, to our English taste, suggests nothing very enticing—a respectable sort of padding, at best, but a few degrees removed in ponderosity from downright moralizing. The prejudice, we admit, is a wholesome one, and the limits of verbal portraiture of all sorts should be jealously guarded. But there is no better proof of Gautier's talent than that he should have triumphantly reformed this venerable abuse and, in the best sense, made one of the heaviest kinds of writing one of the lightest. Of his process and his success we could give an adequate idea only by a long series of citations, and these we lack the opportunity to collect. The reader would conclude with us, we think, that Gautier is an inimitable model. He would never find himself condemned to that thankless task of pulling the cart up hill—retouching the picture—which in most descriptions is fatal to illusion. The author's manner is so light and true, so really creative, his fancy so alert, his taste so happy, his humour so genial, that he makes illusion almost as contagious as laughter; the image, the object, the scene, stands arrested by his phrase with the wholesome glow of truth overtaken. Gautier's
