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46 lights the book is almost ludicrously innocent, and we are at a loss what to think of those critics who either hailed or denounced it as a serious profession of faith. With faith of any sort Gautier strikes us as slenderly furnished. Even his æsthetic principles are held with a good-humoured laxity that allows him, for instance, to say in a hundred places the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean drama, and yet to describe a pedantically classical revival of the "Antigone" at Munich with the most ungrudging relish. The only very distinct statement of intellectual belief that we remember in his pages is the singularly perfect little poem which closes the collection of chiselled and polished verses called "Émaux et Camées." It is a charming example of Gautier at his best, and we shall be pardoned for quoting it.

L'ART.

Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

Point de contraintes fausses! Mais que pour marcher droit Tu chausses, Muse, un cothurne étroit.