udet's lapses from the kindliness
with which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seems
to have kept hot a grudge against the theatre: and he relieves his
feelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his
novels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is
factitious and self-overvaluing in the Provencal type, he understood
and he found it easy to pardon; but what was factitious and
self-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and he
refused to pardon. And here he shows in strong contrast with a
successful dramatist, M. Ludovic Halevy, whose knowledge of the
histrionic temperament is at least as wide as Daudet's and whose humor
is as keen, but whose judgment is softened by the grateful memory of
many victories won by the united effort of the author and the actor.

Through his brother's influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the
Duke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told his
benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and how
the Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was
as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first
appearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter; and he soon
came forward also as a journalist,--or rather as a contributor to the
papers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weekly
press were of ephemeral interest only, as the necessity of journalism
demands, to be forgotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, not
a few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value.
Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are the
newspapers of New York or of London; and a goodly proportion of the
young Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preservation.

It has been preserved for us in three volumes of short stories and
sketches, of fantasies and impressions. Not all the contents of the
"Letters from my Mill," of the "Monday Tales" and of "Artists' Wives,"
as we have these collections now, were written in these early years of
Daudet's Parisian career, but many of them saw the light before 1870,
and what has been added since conforms in method to the work of his
'prentice days. No doubt the war with Prussia enlarged his outlook on
life; and there is more depth in the satires this conflict suggested
and more pathos in the pictures it evoked. The "Last Lesson," for
example, that simple vis