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Rh lavished in newspaper feuilletons and light periodicals. Here the vivid, plastic image is his natural, constant formula; he scatters pictures as a fine singer roulades; every paragraph is the germ of a sonnet, every sentence a vignette. "It is pure Lacrima-Christi," as Sainte-Beuve says, "qu'on vous verse au coin d'une borne." The twenty-five volumes or so into which this long daily labour has been gathered—feuilletons and sketches, novels and tales, records of travel, reports of "damned" plays and unsold pictures—form a great treasury of literary illustration. When Gautier, according to present promise, begins to be remembered mainly as the author of an indecent novel whose title is circulated in the interest of virtue, needy poets may deck their wares for the market with unmissed flowers of description from his blooming plantations. He has commemorated every phase and mood and attribute of nature and every achievement and possibility of art; and you have only to turn his pages long enough to find the perfect presentment of your own comparatively dim and unshaped vision.

Early in life he began to travel—to travel far for a Frenchman—and, of course, to publish his impressions. They relate altogether to the look of the countries he visited—to landscape, art-collections, street-scenery and costume. On the "institutions" of foreign lands he is