Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/37

Rh than to have the facts loyally discovered and intelligently ordered, the arguments judicially summarised and criticised. But whether it pays sufficient attention to that "human nature" which is after all the historian's main subject, may be questioned. And it is perhaps specially unwise (though it is specially natural) when the writer is "two" or more "gentlemen at once," when it is perfectly well known that he has all the necessary powers at command and merely declines to use them. Mérimée had, if he had chosen to attend to it, a good example set him by the greatest of his craftfellows in both crafts.

It is well known how fascinatingly Scott has told the history of Scotland, yet I have been assured by one of the soberest and most thoroughgoing students of that history from the purely historical side, that it would have been difficult in Scott's time to give a better account. Nor does Mérimée, any more than Scott himself, disdain reference to purely romantic or mythical "excursions and alarms." He does not omit the wild and ghastly legend of Stenka Razine, the Cossack pirate, flinging his Persian captive and mistress overboard in all her gorgeous array, not because he was tired of her, not because he had a quarrel with her, but as "a gift to the sea which had given him so much"; the almost