of every day, the spectacle of man's eternal betise. Fascinated,
like a veritable son of the old pagan Renaissance, by the grandeur,
the concentration, the satiric hardness of ancient Roman character,
it is to Russia nevertheless that he most readily turns--youthful
Russia, whose native force, still unbelittled by our western
civilisation, seemed to have in it the promise of a more dignified
civilisation to come. It was as if old Rome itself were here again;
as, occasionally, a new quarry is laid open of what was thought long
since exhausted, ancient marble, cipollino or verde antique.
Merimee, indeed, was not the first to discern the fitness for
imaginative service of the career of "the false Demetrius," pretended
[18] son of Ivan the Terrible; but he alone seeks its utmost force in
a calm, matter-of-fact carefully ascertained presentment of the naked
events. Yes! In the last years of the Valois, when its fierce
passions seemed to be bursting France to pieces, you might have seen,
far away beyond the rude Polish dominion of which one of those Valois
princes had become king, a display more effective still of
exceptional courage and cunning, of horror in circumstance, of
betise, of course, of betise and a slavish capacity of being duped,
in average mankind: all that under a mask of solemn Muscovite court-
ceremonial. And Merimee's style, simple and unconcerned, but with
the eye ever on its object, lends itself perfectly to such purpose--
to an almost phlegmatic discovery of the facts, in all their crude
natural colouring, as if he but held up to view, as a piece of
evidence, some harshly dyed oriental carpet from the sumptuous floor
of the Kremlin, on which blood had fallen.

A lover of ancient Rome, its great character and incident, Merimee
valued, as if it had been personal property of his, every extant
relic of it in the art that had been most expressive of its genius--