nd here about Alphonse Karr, it is certainly not
because the present writer undervalues his general literary position. As
a journalist and miscellanist, Karr had few superiors in a century of
miscellaneous journalism; and as a maker of telling and at the same time
solid phrase, he was Voltaire's equal in the first respect and his
superior in the second. The immortal "Que MM. les assassins commencent,"
already referred to, is perhaps the best example in all literature of
the terse _argumentum joculare_ which is not more sparkling as a joke
than it is crushing as an argument; "Plus ca change plus c'est la meme
chose"[301] is nearly as good; and if one were writing a history, not of
the novel, but of journalism or essay-writing of the lighter kind, Karr
would have high place and large room. But as a novelist he does not seem
to me to be of much importance, nor even as a tale-teller, except of the
anecdotic kind. He can hardly be dull, and you seldom read him long
without coming to something[302] refreshing in his own line; but his
tales, as tales, are rarely first-rate, and I do not think that even
_Sous les Tilleuls_, his best-known and perhaps best production, needs
much delay over it.

[Sidenote: Roger de Beauvoir--_Le Cabaret des Morts_.]

Roger de Beauvoir (whose _de_ was genuine, but who embellished "Bully,"
his actual surname, into the one by which he was generally known) also
had, like Bernard and Reybaud, the honour of being noticed, translated,
and to some extent commented on by Thackeray.[303] I have, in old times,
read more of his novels than I distinctly remember; and they are not
very easy to procure in England now. Moreover, though he was of the
right third or fourth _cru_ of _mil-huit-cent-trente_, there was
something wanting in his execution. I have before me a volume of short
stories, excellently entitled (from the first of them) _Le Cabaret des
Morts_. One imagines at once what Poe or Gautier, what even Bulwer or
Washington Irving, would have made of this. Roger (one may call him this
without undue familiarity, because it is the true factor in both his
names) has a good idea--the muster of defunct painters in an ancient
Antwerp pot-house at ghost-time, and their story-telling. The contrast
of them with the beautiful _living_ barmaid might have been--but is
not--made extremely effective. In fact the fatal improbability--in the
Aristotelian, not the Barbauldian sense--broods over the whole. And the
Cabare