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xxiv doing it, which can hardly be paralleled; while Beyle's work is to a great extent mere sketch, if not mere fragment, and even in the more apparently finished pieces displays a want of accomplishment, an uneasy and almost fretful tentativeness, which is quite as much due to uncertainty of plan as to imperfect command of style. That these differences prevented Beyle from exercising any influence on Mérimée I should not dream of suggesting; but I think now that they limited that influence decidedly, and that Mérimée would have been very much what he was if he had never met, and even never read, Beyle at all.

Returning to the books, it will probably be well to observe a good old rule and despatch the least interesting and those which will not be included within the present collection, first. Mérimée's historical work occupies a peculiar—I should think almost a unique position. It is certainly not the most common of things to find a historian who possesses unlimited patience and devotion to the "document," possessing at the same time a signal command of purely literary power. It is still more uncommon to find-these two faculties further combined with that not merely of writing, but of arranging what; is written dramatically. Now Mérimée had all three—and all three to an extent very unusual,