nly in Paris. His epitaph, composed by himself
with the utmost care, was as follows:

QUI GIACE ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE VISSE, SCRISSE, AMO.

The words, read rightly, indicate many things--his adoration of Italy
and Milan, his eccentricity, his scorn of the conventions of society and
the limits of nationality, his adventurous life, his devotion to
literature, and, lastly, the fact that, through all the varieties of his
experience--in the earliest years of his childhood, in his agitated
manhood, in his calm old age--there had never been a moment when he was
not in love.

Beyle's work falls into two distinct groups--the first consisting of his
novels, and the second of his miscellaneous writings, which include
several biographies, a dissertation on Love, some books of criticism and
travel, his letters and various autobiographical fragments. The bulk of
the latter group is large; much of it has only lately seen the light;
and more of it, at present in MS. at the library of Grenoble, is
promised us by the indefatigable editors of the new complete edition
which is now appearing in Paris. The interest of this portion of Beyle's
writings is almost entirely personal: that of his novels is mainly
artistic. It was as a novelist that Beyle first gained his celebrity,
and it is still as a novelist--or rather as the author of _Le Rouge et
Le Noir_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_ (for an earlier work, _Armance_,
some short stories, and some later posthumous fragments may be left out
of account)--that he is most widely known to-day. These two remarkable
works lose none of their significance if we consider the time at which
they were composed. It was in the full flood of the Romantic revival,
that marvellous hour in the history of French literature when the
tyranny of two centuries was shattered for ever, and a boundless wealth
of inspirations, possibilities, and beauties before undreamt-of suddenly
burst upon the view. It was the hour of Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier,
Balzac, with their new sonorities and golden cadences, their new lyric
passion and dramatic stress, their new virtuosities, their new impulse
towards the strange and the magnificent, their new desire for diversity
and the manifold comprehension of life. But, if we turn to the
contemporaneous pages of Stendhal, what do we find? We find a succession
of colourless, unemphatic sentences; we find cold reasoning and exact
narrative; we find polite irony and dry wit. The spiri