isagreeable for the
other part, and of having the times so arranged that each sees the other
at his or her most repulsive to her or his actual state. The way in
which "Love unconquered in battle" proves, though not without fairy
assistance, victorious here also, is very ingeniously managed.

One of the cleverest of all the later fairy tales is the _Acajou et
Zirphile_ of Duclos, who, indeed, had sufficient wits to do anything
well, and was a novelist, though not a very distinguished one, on a
larger scale. The tale itself (which is said to have been written "up
to" illustrations of Boucher designed for something else) has, indeed,
a smatch of vulgarity, but a purely superfluous and easily removable
one. It is almost as cleverly written as any thing of Voltaire's: and
the final situation, where the hero, who has gone through all the
mischiefs and triumphs of one of Crebillon's, recovers his only real
love, Zirphile, in a torment and tornado of heads separated from bodies
and hands separated from arms, is rather capital.

Not much less so, in the different way of a pretty sentimentality, is
the _Aglae ou Naboline_ of the painter Coypel; while the batch of short
stories from Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont's _Magasin des Enfants_ have had
a curious fate. They are rather pooh-poohed by French editors and
critics, and they are certainly _very_ moral, too much so, in fact, as
has been already objected to one of them, _Le Prince Cheri_. But
allowances have been allowed even there, and, somehow or other, _Fatal
et Fortune_, _Le Prince Charmant_, _Joliette_, and the rest have
recovered more of the root of the matter than most others, and have
established a just popularity in translation.

And then comes the shortest, I think, of all the stories in the one and
forty volumes; the silliest as a composition; the most contemptibly
_thought_--but by the accidents of fate endowed later with a
tragic-satiric _moralitas_ almost if not quite unrivalled in literature.
Its author was a certain M. Selis, apparently a very respectable
schoolmaster, professor, and bookmaker of not the lowest
class--employments and occupations in respect of all of which not a few
of us have earned our bread and paid our income-tax. Unluckily for him,
there was born in his time a Dauphin, and he wrote a little adulatory
tale of the birth, and the editors of the _Cabinet_ Appendix thanked him
much for giving it them. It is not four pages long; it tells how an
ances