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62 story was published, we believe, some twenty-five years after it was announced—and announced because the author had taken a fancy to the title and proposed to write "up" to it. We cannot say how much of the long interval was occupied with this endeavour; but certainly the "Capitaine Fracasse" is as good as if a quarter of a century had been given to it. Besides being his most ambitious work it bears more marks of leisure and meditation than its companions. M. Meissonier might have written it, if, with the same talent and a good deal more geniality, he had chosen to use the pen rather than the brush. The subject is just such a one as Gautier was born to appreciate—a subject of which the pictorial side emphasizes itself as naturally as that of "Don Quixote." It is borrowed, indeed, but as great talents borrow—for a use that brings the original into fashion again. Scarron's "Roman Comique," which furnished Gautier with his starting-point, is as barren to the eye as "Gil Blas" itself, besides being a much coarser piece of humour. The sort of memory one retains of the "Capitaine Fracasse" is hard to express, save by some almost physical analogy. We remember the perusal of most good novels as an intellectual pleasure—a pleasure which varies in degree, but is as far as it goes an affair of the mind. The hours spent over