l 1863, had been announced long beforehand; and Gautier had worked
at it, off and on, for twenty years. It belongs to that class of novel
known as picaresque--romances of adventures and battles. 'Captain
Fracasse' is certainly the most popular of Gautier's works.

'The Romance of the Mummy' is a very remarkable book, in which science
and fiction have been blended in the most artistic and clever manner;
picturesque, like all of Gautier's writings, but the work of a savant
as well as of a novelist. Here more than in any other book by this
author,--with the exception perhaps of 'Arria Marcella,'--Gautier has
revived in a most lifelike way an entire civilization, so long
extinct. 'The Romance of the Mummy' abounds in beautiful descriptions.
The description of the finding of the mummy, that of the royal tombs,
of Thebes with its hundred gates, the triumphal entrance of Pharaoh
into that city, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, are all
marvelous pictures, that not only fill the reader with the same
admiration he would evince at the sight of a painting by one of the
great masters, but give him the illusion of witnessing in the body the
scenes so admirably described.

'Spirite,' a fantastic story, is a source of surprise to readers
familiar with Gautier's other works: they find it hard to conceive
that so thorough a materialist as Gautier could ever have produced a
work so spiritualistic in its nature. The clever handling of a mystic
subject, the richness and coloring of the descriptions, together with
a certain ideal and poetical vein that runs through the book, make of
'Spirite' one of Gautier's most remarkable works.

Theophile Gautier has also written a number of _nouvelles_ or short
novels, and tales, some of which are striking compositions. 'Arria
Marcella' is one of these; a brilliant, masterly composition, in which
Gautier gives us such a perfect illusion of the past. Under his magic
pen we find ourselves walking the streets of Pompeii and living over
the life of the Romans in the first century of our era; and 'Une Nuit
de Cleopatre' (A Night with Cleopatra) is a vivid resurrection of the
brilliant Egyptian court.

Of his various journeys to Spain, Italy, and the Orient, Gautier has
given us the most captivating relations. To many this is not the least
interesting portion of Gautier's work. The same qualities that are so
striking in his poems and novels--vividness of description, love of
the picturesque,