me of "Luisante"; the shape of her face seemed
made to frame so many wonders. But her eyes spoilt
everything.

No one had ever been able to look at them long enough to
distinguish their exact colour; for as soon as one met her
glance it was like a stroke of lightning. When she was eight
years old her father, the Caliph, was in the habit of
sending for her, to admire his offspring and give the
courtiers the opportunity of paying a thousand feeble
compliments to her youthful beauty; for even then they used
to put out the candles at midnight, no other light being
necessary except that of the little one's eyes. Yet all this
was nothing but--in the literal sense, and the
other--child's play; it was when her eyes had acquired full
strength that they became no joking matter.

[_The fatal effects--killing men in twenty-four hours, and blinding
women--are then told, with the complaints of the nobility whose sons
have fallen victims, and the various suggestions for remedying the evil
made at a committee, which is presided over by the Seneschal of the
kingdom ... "the silliest man who had ever held such an office--so much
so that the caliph could not possibly think of choosing any one less
silly." Tarare happens to be in this pundit-potentate's service; and so
the story starts._]

[Sidenote: _Les Quatre Facardins._]

But--and indeed the writer's opinion on this point has already been
indicated--Hamilton's masterpiece, unfinished as it is, is _Les Quatre
Facardins_. Indeed, though unfinished in one sense, it is, in another,
the most finished of all. Beside it the completed _Faustus_ is a mere
trifle, and not a very interesting trifle. It has no dull parts like
_Zeneyde_ and even _Le Belier_. It has much greater complication of
interest and variety of treatment than _Fleur d'Epine_, in which, after
the opening, Hamilton's peculiar _persiflage_, though not absent, is
much less noticeable. It at least suggests, tantalising as the
suggestion is, that the author for once really intended to wind up all
his threads into a compact ball, or (which is the better image) to weave
them into a new and definite pattern. Moreover--this may not be a
recommendation to everybody, but it is a very strong one to the present
historian,--it has no obvious or insistent "key"-element whatsoever. It
is, indeed, not at all unlikely that there _is_ one, for the trick was
ingrained in