eem
a little watered out. But you cannot expect acrobatics on wine-glasses
of this kind always to "come off" without some slips and breakages.

On the whole, I think _Entre Nous_ contains the very best things, and
most good ones. The pathos of the first (which is itself by no means
mere _pleurnicherie_) is balanced at the other end by the audacity of
"Le Sentiment a l'Epreuve," a most agreeable "washing white" of the main
idea of Wycherley's _Country Wife_; and between the two, few in the
whole score are inferior. "Nocturne," "Oscar," "Causerie," and "Le
Maillot de Madame" were once marked for special commendation by a critic
who certainly deserved the epithet of competent, in addition to those of
fair and gentle. It is, however, in this volume that what seems to me
Droz's one absolute failure occurs. It is neither comic nor tragic,
neither naughty nor nice, and one really wonders how it came to be put
in. It is entitled "Les de Saint-Paon," and is a commonplace, hackneyed,
quite unhumorous, and rather ill-tempered satire on certain dubious
aristocrats and anti-modernists. Nothing could be cheaper or less
pointed. And the insertion of it is all the stranger because, elsewhere,
there is something very similar, in subject and tendency, but of half
the length and ten times the wit, in "Le Petit Lever," a conversation
between a certain Count and his valet.

The plain critical fact is that the non-pathetic serious was in no way
Droz's trade. His satire on matters ecclesiastical is sometimes
delightful when it is mere _persiflage_: an Archbishop might relax over
the conversation in Paradise between two great ladies, one of whom has
charitably stirred up the efforts of her director in favour of her own
coachman to such effect, that she actually finds that menial promoted to
a much higher sphere Above than that which she herself occupies. But
here, also, the more gravity the less goodness.

Yet, as was hinted at the beginning of this notice, we ought not to
quarrel with him for this, and to do so would be again to fall into the
old "gin-shop and leg-of-mutton" unreasonableness. It was M. Droz's
mission to start a new form of Crebillonade--_panache_ (to use an
excellent term of French cookery), here and there, with another new form
of Sensibility. He did it quite admirably, and he taught the simpler
device--the compound one hardly--to pupils, some of whom still divert,
or at least distract, the world. I am not at all ashamed t