elf. But he had any number of literary and
other avocations or distractions. He was a kind of entomologist and
botanist, a kind of philologist (one is a little astonished to find that
rather curious and very charlatanish person and parson Sir Herbert
Croft, whose secretary Nodier was for a time, dignified in French books
by the name of "_philologue_ Anglais"), a good deal more than a kind of
bibliographer (he spent the last twenty years of his life as Librarian
of the Arsenal), and an enthusiastic and stimulating, though not exactly
trustworthy, critic. But he concerns us here, of course, for his prose
fiction, which, if not very bulky, is numerous in its individual
examples, and is animated in the best of them by a spirit almost new in
French and, though often not sufficiently caught and concentrated,
present to almost the highest degrees in at least three examples--the
last part of _La Fee aux Miettes_, _La Legende de Soeur Beatrix_, and,
above all, _Ines de las Sierras_.

For those who delight in literary filiations and genealogies, the kind
of story in which Nodier excelled (and in which, though some of his own
were written after 1830, he may truly be considered as "schoolmaster" to
Merimee and Gautier and Gerard de Nerval and all their fellows), may be,
without violence or exaggeration, said to be a new form of the French
fairy-tale, divested of common form, and readjusted with the help of the
German _Maerchen_ and fantasy-pieces. _Le Diable Amoureux_ had, no doubt,
set the fashion of this kind earlier; but that story, charming as it is,
is still scarcely "Romantic." Nodier is so wholly; and it is fair to
remember that Hoffmann himself was rather a contemporary of his, and
subject to the same influences, than a predecessor.[81]

[Sidenote: His short stories.]

The best collection of Nodier's short tales contains nine pieces:
_Trilby_, _Le Songe d'Or_, _Baptiste Montauban_, _La Fee aux Miettes_,
_La Combe de l'Homme mort_, _Ines de las Sierras_, _Smarra_, _La
Neuvaine de la Chandeleur_, and _La Legende de Soeur Beatrix_. Of
these I believe _Trilby_, _La Fee aux Miettes_, and _Smarra_ have been
the greatest favourites, and were pretty certainly the most influential
in France. My own special delights are _Le Songe d'Or_, _Ines de las
Sierras_, and _Soeur Beatrix_, with part of the _Fee_. But none is
without its attractions, and the Preface to the _Fee aux Miettes_, which
is almost a separate piece, has something of