family history;
there, patches of criticism in art or drama; once at least an elaborate
and--for the time--very well informed as well as enthusiastic sketch of
French seventeenth-century poetry. It may annoy the captious to find
another kind of confusion, for which one is not sure that Gerard himself
was responsible, though it is consistent enough with his peculiarities.
Passages are redistributed among different books and pieces in a rather
bewildering manner; and you occasionally rub your eyes at coming
across--in a very different context, or simply shorn of its old
one--something that you have met before. To others this, if not exactly
an added charm, will at any rate be admitted to "grace of congruity." It
would be less like Gerard if it were otherwise.

[Sidenote: Particular examples.]

In fact it is in these mixed pieces that Gerard's great attraction lies.
His regular stories, professedly of a Hoffmannesque kind, such as _La
Main Enchantee_ and _Le Monstre Vert_, are good, but not extraordinarily
good, and classable with many other things of many other people. I, at
least, know nothing quite like _Aurelia_ and _Sylvie_, though the
dream-pieces of Landor and De Quincey have a certain likeness, and
Nodier's _La Fee aux Miettes_ a closer one.

[Sidenote: _Aurelia._]

_Aurelia_ (which, whether complete in itself or not, was pretty clearly
intended to be followed by other things under the general title of _Le
Reve et la Vie_) has, as might be expected, more dream than life in it.
Or rather it is like one of those actual dreams which themselves mix up
life--a dream in the composition. Aurelia is the book-name of a lady,
loved (actually, it seems) and in some degree responsible for her
lover's aberrations of mind. He thinks he loves another, but finds he
does not. The two objects of his passion meet, and the second generously
brings about a sort of reconciliation with the first. But he has to go
to Paris on business, and there he becomes a mere John-a-Dreams, if not,
in a mild way, a mere Tom of Bedlam. The chief drops into reality,
indeed, are mentions of his actual visits to _maisons de sante_. But the
thing is impossible to abstract or analyse, too long to translate as a
whole, and too much woven in one piece to cut up. It must be read as it
stands, and any person of tolerable intelligence will know in a page or
two whether Gerard is the man for him or not. But when he was writing it
he was already over even the