r opportunity, mainly by the development of its actual
historic characters. Those characters--Catherine de Medicis and the
rest--Merimee, with significant irony and self-assertion, sets aside,
preferring to think of them as essentially commonplace. For him the
interest lies in the creatures of his own will, who carry in them,
however, so lightly! a learning equal to Balzac's, greater than that of
Dumas. He knows with like completeness the mere fashions of the
time--how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the large
movements of the desperate game which fate or chance was playing with
those pretty pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the French
Renaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic
passions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only
perhaps!) of general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as if
with regret, "is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel,
and the whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a
certain regularity on assassination, what has been well called le
sentiment du fer, the sentiment of deadly steel, had then the
disposition of refined existence. It was, indeed, very different, and
is, in Merimee's romance. In his gallant hero, Bernard de Mergy, all
the promptings of the lad's virile goodness are in natural collusion
with that sentiment du fer. Amid his ingenuous blushes, his prayers,
and plentiful tears between-while, it is a part of his very sex. With
his delightful, fresh-blown air, he is for ever tossing the sheath from
the sword, but always as if into bright natural sunshine. A winsome,
yet withal serious and even piteous figure, he conveys his
pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Merimee's one quite
cheerful book.

Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but
the accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions
in which Merimee was most apt to look for the spectacle of human power,
allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at least, it
was the office of fiction to carry one into a different if not a better
world than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle of Charles the
Ninth provided an escape from the tame circumstances of contemporary
life into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure of the resources
for mental alteration which may be found even in the modern age. There
was a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the