feuilleton it might proceed from Mr. Barlow, and be addressed to Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton. These genial commonplaces are Gautier's only tributes to philosophy. It seems as absurd to us as that very puerile performance itself that the philosophic pretensions of the famous preface to "Mademoiselle de Maupin" should have provoked any other retort than a laugh. Gautier was incapable of looking, for an appreciable duration of time, at any other than the superficial, the picturesque, face of a question. If you find him glancing closer, you may be sure, with all respect, that the phenomenon will last just as long as a terrier will stand on his hind-legs.
To raise on such a basis so large a structure was possible only to a Frenchman, and to a Frenchman inordinately endowed with the national sense of form and relish for artistic statement. Gautier's structure is composed of many pieces. He began, in his early youth, with "Mademoiselle de Maupin." It has seemed to us rather a painful exhibition of the prurience of the human mind that, in most of the recent notices of the author's death (those, at least, published in England and America) this work alone should have been selected as the critic's text. It is Gautier's one disagreeable performance; how it came to be written it is of small profit at this time to inquire. In certain
