hunger, their playhouse manners and morals, are certainly not very choice company; but the author handles them with an affectionate, sympathetic jocosity of which we so speedily feel the influence that, long before we have finished, we seem to have drunk with them one and all out of the playhouse goblet to the confusion of respectability and life before the scenes. If we incline to look for deeper meanings, we can fancy the work in the last analysis an expression of that brotherly sympathy with the social position of the comedian which Gautier was too much what the French call an homme de théâtre not to entertain as an almost poetic sentiment. The "Capitaine Fracasse" ranks, in our opinion, with the first works of imagination produced in our day.
Of Gautier as a critic there is not much to say that we have not said of him as a traveller and storyteller. Rigid critic he was none; it was not in his nature to bring himself to fix a standard. The things he liked he spoke well of; of the things he disliked, a little less well. His brother critics, who would have preferred to count on him to substantiate their severities, found him unpardonably "genial." We imagine that, in the long run, he held a course nearer the truth than theirs, and did better service. His irresistible need for the positive
