casting the successive episodes of a Mohammedan immortality. This pretension, however, did him injustice: and such a book as the "Voyage en Russie;" such chapters as his various notes on the Low Countries, their landscape and their painters; such a sketch, indeed, as his wonderful humoristigue history of a week in London, in his "Caprices et Zigzags"—prove abundantly that he had more than one string to his bow. He shot equally far with them all. Each of his chapters of travel has a perfect tone of its own and that unity of effect which is the secret of the rarest artists. The "Voyage en Espagne" is a masterly mixture of hot lights and warm shadows; the "Constantinople" is an immense verbal Decamps, as one may say; and the "Voyage en Russie," compounded of effects taken from the opposite end of the scale, is illuminated with the cold blue light of the North. Gautier's volumes abound in records of the most unadventurous excursions—light sketches of a feuilletonist's holidays. His fancy found its account in the commonest things as well as the rarest—in Callot as well as in Paul Veronese—and these immediate notes are admirable in their multicoloured reflections of the perpetual entertainment of Nature. Gautier found Nature supremely entertaining; this seems to us the shortest description of him. She had no barren places
