now. To repeat that there are good scenes and
piquant remarks is merely to say once more that the thing is Hamilton's.
But, on the whole, the present writer at any rate has always found it
the least interesting (next to _L'Enchanteur Faustus_) of all.

On the other hand, _Zeneyde_--though unfinished, and though containing,
in its ostensibly main story, things compared to which the Prince de
Noisy and the Vicomte de Gonesse excite to palpitation--has points of
remarkable interest about it. One of these--a prefatory sketch of the
melancholy court of exiles at St. Germains--is like nothing else in
Hamilton and like very few things anywhere else. This is in no sense
fiction--it is, in fact, a historical document of the most striking
kind; but it makes background and canvas for fiction itself,[292] and it
gives us, besides, a most vivid picture of the priest-ridden, caballing
little crowd of folk who had made great renunciations but could not make
small. It also shows us in Hamilton a somewhat darker but also a
stronger side of satiric powers, differently nuanced from the quiet
_persiflage_ of the _Contes_ themselves. This, however, though easily
"cobbled on" to the special tale, and possibly not unconnected with it
key-fashion, is entirely separable, and might just as well have formed
part of an actual letter to the "Madame de P.," to whom it is addressed.

The tale itself, like some if not all the others, but in a much more
strikingly contrasted fashion, again consists of two strands, interwoven
so intimately, however, that it is almost impossible to separate them,
though it is equally impossible to conceive two things more different
from each other. The ostensible theme is a history of herself, given by
the Nymph of the Seine to the author--a history of which more presently.
But this is introduced at considerable length, and interrupted more than
once, by scenes and dialogues, between the nymph and her distinctly
unwilling auditor, which are of the most whimsically humorous character
to be found even in Hamilton himself.

The whole account of the self-introduction of the nymph to the narrator
is extremely quaint, but rather long to give here as a whole. It is
enough to say that Hamilton represents himself as by no means an ardent
nympholept, or even as flattered by demi-goddess-like advances, which
are of the most obliging description; and that the lady has not only to
make fuller and fuller revelations of her beauty, bu