of them as essentially commonplace. For him the interest lies in the
creatures of his own will, who carry in them, however, so lightly! a
learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of Dumas. He knows
with like completeness the mere fashions of the time--how courtier
and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements of the
desperate game which fate or chance was playing with those pretty
pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the French Renaissance
with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in
the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps!) of
general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as if with regret,
"is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel, and the
whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a certain
regularity on assassination, what has been well called le sentiment
du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the disposition of
refined existence. It was, indeed, very different, and is, in
Merimee's romance. In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all the
promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion with
that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers, and
plentiful tears between-while, it is a part of his very sex. With
his delightful, fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath
from the sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine. A
winsome, yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys his
pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Merimee's one quite
cheerful book.

Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but
the accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions
in which Merimee was most apt to look for the spectacle of human
power, allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at
least, it was the office of fiction to carry one into a different if