robably exists, as indeed it does in almost everything of the day, from
the big as well as "great" _Cyrus_ to the little, but certainly not much
less great, _Princesse de Cleves_. But our subject is what Hamilton
writes about these people, not the people about whom he may or may not
be writing.

What we have left of Hamilton's tales, as far as they have been printed
(and, as was said above, not much more seems to exist), consists of five
stories of very unequal length, and in two cases out of the five
unfinished. One of the finished pieces, _Fleur d'Epine_, and one of the
unfinished--although unfinished it is not only one of the longest, but,
unluckily in a way, by far the best of all--_Les Quatre Facardins_, are
"framework" stories, and avowedly attach themselves, in an irreverent
sort of attachment, to the _Arabian Nights_; the others, _Le Belier_,
_Zeneyde_ (unfinished), and _L'Enchanteur Faustus_, are independent, and
written in the mixed verse-and-prose style which had been made popular
by various writers, especially Chapelle, but which cannot be said to be
very acceptable in itself. Taken together, they fill a volume of just
over 500 average octavo pages in the standard edition of 1812; but their
individual length is very unequal. The two longest, the fragmentary
_Quatre Facardins_ and the finished _Le Belier_, run each of them to 142
pages; the shortest, _L'Enchanteur Faustus_, has just five-and-twenty;
while _Fleur d'Epine_, in its completeness, has 114, and _Zeneyde_, in
its incompleteness, runs to 78, and might have run, for aught one can
tell--in the mixed tangle of Roman and Merovingian history in which the
author (possibly in ridicule of Madeleine de Scudery's classical
chronicling) has chosen to plunge it--to 780 or 7800, which latter
figure would, after all, have been little more than half the length of
the _Grand Cyrus_ itself.

We may take _L'Enchanteur Faustus_ first, as it requires the shortest
notice. In fact, if it had not been Hamilton's, it would hardly require
any. Written to a "charmante Daphne" (evidently one of the English
Jacobite exiles, from a reference to a great-great-grandfather of hers
who was "admiral in Ireland" during Queen Elizabeth's time), it is
occupied by a story of the great Queen herself, who is treated with the
mixture of admiration (for her intelligence and spirit) with "scandal"
(about her person and morals) that might be expected at St. Germains.
The subject is the usual