in art, for something describable—phrasable, as we may say—often led him to fancy merit where it was not, but more often, probably, to detect it where it lurked. He was a constructive commentator; and if the work taken as his text is often below his praise, the latter, with its magical grasp of the idea, may serve as a sort of generous lesson. His work as a critic is very abundant and has been but partially collected. For many years he reported elaborately on the annual Salon and produced a weekly review of the theatre. His accounts of the Salon, which have yet to be republished, form, probably, the best history—if also the least didactic—of modern French art. When pictures and statues have passed out of sight, it is rather meagre entertainment to peruse amendments to their middle distance and to the finer points in their anatomy. Gautier's pages preserve what was best in them—the attempt, the image, the vision. His criticism illustrates more pointedly, perhaps, than his poems and tales, his native incapacity to moralize. Occasionally, we think, a promising subject comes near being sacrificed to it. We were lately struck, in reading the delightful "Correspondance" of Henri Regnault, whose herald-in-chief Gautier constituted himself, with the latter's fatally shallow conception of the duties of an æsthetic guide,
