manners of which
assassination still had a large part.

"The beauty of Corsica," says Merimee, "is grave and sad. The aspect
of the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitude
that surrounds it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear
there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common in
the towns of Italy. Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on the
promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking on
at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk the
pavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors: every
one seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. All around
the gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleached
mountains. Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the heights
about the town, certain white constructions detach themselves from the
background of green. They are funeral chapels or family tombs."

Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Merimee here describes
it, is like the national passion of the Corsican--that morbid personal
pride, usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries
of traditional violence had concentrated into an all-absorbing passion
for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion with the natural
wildness, and the wild social condition of the island still unaffected
even by the finer [24] ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that
passion is well indicated by the cry, put into the mouth of a young man
in the presence of the corpse of his father deceased in the course of
nature--a young man meant to be commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst
died malamorte--by violence! We might have avenged thee!"

In Colomba, Merimee's best known creation, it is united to a singularly
wholesome type of personal beauty, a natural grace of manner which is
irresistible, a cunning intellect patiently diverting every
circumstance to its design; and presents itself as a kind of genius,
allied to fatal disease of mind. The interest of Merimee's book is
that it allows us to watch the action of this malignant power on
Colomba's brother, Orso della Robbia, as it discovers, rouses,
concentrates to the leaping-point, in the somewhat weakly diffused
nature of the youth, the dormant elements of a dark humour akin to her
own. Two years after his father's murder, presumably at the
instigation of his ancestral enemies, the young lieutenant is returning
home in the compan