Page:The Writings of Prosper Merimee-Volume 1.djvu/38

Rh stranger justice—chivalrous justice for once—of Don Pedro on the felon defenders of the castle of Cabezon. But he will not give the vivifying touch to the whole, and so these wholes, as wholes, are neglected.

His Essays or Miscellanies have an interest, if not intrinsically greater, yet for several reasons of wider appeal. Being all short, they make no severe demands on the attention of the reader, and they perhaps put the peculiar genius of the writer all the better. Moreover, in their wide diversity of subject there is something to suit almost everybody who has any literary tastes at all. They deal with art and archæology, with biography and literature, with history and bric-à-brac, with things ancient and things modern, with things French and things not French. The mere survey and casual selection of their contents—Cervantes, Nodier, Beyle, Froissart, Brantôme, Pushkin, Turgueineff, Gogol, The Mormons, A Tomb at Tarragona, The Hotel de Cluny, Spanish Literature, Military Architecture in the Middle Ages, Constantinople in 1403—supplies a sort of test of appetite; a person who can not find something appetising among these (and there are others)