es as
offspring of Destiny and the Earth, with a cruel brother Time, and an
offset of mischievous sisters who exactly correspond to the good
ones--Disgracieuse to Gracieuse, and so on--and have a queen
Laide-des-Laides, who answers to the good fairy princess,
Belle-des-Belles. A mortal--Zulma--is, for paternal rather than personal
merits, chosen by Destiny to enjoy the privilege of entering and
understanding the fairy world, and Gracieuse is the fairy assigned as
his guide. The idea is, as has been said, rather ingenious; but it is
too systematic, and like other things in other parts of the collection,
"loses the grace and liberty of the composition" in system. Moreover,
the morality, as is rather the wont of these imitators when they are not
(as a few of the partly non-cabinetted ones are) deliberately naughty,
is much too scrupulous.[235] It is clear that Zulma is in love with
Gracieuse, that she responds to some extent, and that Her Majesty Queen
Belle-des-Belles is a little jealous and inclined to cut Gracieuse out.
But nothing in the finished part of the story gives us any of the nice
love-making that we want.

[Sidenote: Fenelon.]

Madame le Marchand's _Boca_ is a story which begins in Peru but finishes
in an "Isle of Ebony," where the names of Zobeide and Abdelazis seem
rather more at home; it is not without merit. As for the fables and
stories which Fenelon composed for that imperfect Marcellus, the Duke of
Burgundy, they have all the merits of style, sense, and good feeling
which they might be expected to have, and it would be absurd to ask of
them qualities which, in the circumstances, they could not display.

The _Chinese Tales_ are about as little Chinese as may be, consisting of
accounts of his punitive metempsychoses by the Mandarin Fum Hoam (a name
afterwards borrowed in better known work), who seems to have been
excluded from the knowledge of anything particularly Celestial.[236] But
they are rather smartly told. On the other hand, _Florine ou la Belle
Italienne_, which is included in the same volume with the sham
_Chinoiseries_, is one of the worst instances of the confusion of kinds
noted above. It honestly prepares one for what is coming by a reference
in the Preface to Fenelon; but a list of _dramatis_ (or _fabulae_)
_personae_, which follows, would have tried the saintliness even of him
of Cambrai almost as much as a German occupation of his archiepiscopal
see. "Agatonphisie," for a personage who