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392 romancer with whom bloodshed and tears were so abundant and subjective compassion so rare had presumably a poor opinion of the stock from which heroes and heroines spring. Many years ago M. Mérimée ceased to publish stories and devoted himself to archæology and linguistics. We have often wondered how during all these years he employed his incisive imagination. The "Lettres à une Inconnue" inform us.

They consist of a series of familiar—often singularly familiar—epistles, addressed during more than thirty years to a lady of whom nothing is generally known. The letters begin apparently about 1838; the last is written in September 1870, two hours before the author's death, in the prime of his country's recent disasters. Love-letters we suppose they are properly to be called; but the reader may judge from a few extracts whether they seem superficially to belong to this category. In his private as well as his public compositions Mérimée was an enemy to fine phrases; and here, instead of burning incense at the feet of his beloved, he treats her to such homely truths as these: "The cakes you eat with such appetite to cure you of the backache you got at the opera surprised me still more. But it isn't that among your defects I don't place coquetry and gluttony in the first rank." "The affection that you have for me is only