style, he once or twice goes very
near it, except that he is not quite so dull; and when the book comes to
an end in a very lame and impotent fashion (the farce being kept up to
the last, and even this end being "recounted" and not made part of the
mainly dialogic action), one is rather relieved at there being no more.
One has seen talent; one has almost glimpsed genius; but what one has
been most impressed with is the glaring fashion in which both the
certainty and the possibility have been thrown away.

[Sidenote: Its "Arcis-Pommeraye" episode.]

The story which has been referred to in passing as muddled, or, to adopt
a better French word, for which we have no exact equivalent, _affuble_
(travestied and overlaid) with eccentricities and interruptions, the
_Histoire_ of the Marquis des Arcis and the Marquise de la Pommeraye,
has received a great deal of praise, most of which it deserves. The
Marquis and the Marquise have entered upon one of the fashionable
_liaisons_ which Crebillon described in his own way. Diderot describes
this one in another. The Marquis gets tired--it is fair to say that he
has offered marriage at the very first, but Madame de la Pommeraye, a
widow with an unpleasant first experience of the state, has declined it.
He shows his tiredness in a gentlemanly manner, but not very mistakably.
His mistress, who is not at first _femina furens_, but who possesses
some feminine characteristics in a dangerous degree, as he might perhaps
have found out earlier if he had been a different person, determines to
make sure of it. She intimates _her_ tiredness, and the Marquis makes
his first step downwards by jumping at the release. They are--the old,
old hopeless folly!--to remain friends, but friends only. But she really
loves him, and after almost assuring herself that he has really ceased
to love her (which, in the real language of love, means that he has
never loved her at all), devises a further, a very clever, but a rather
diabolical system of last proof, involving vengeance if it fails. She
has known, in exercises of charity (the _femme du monde_ has seldom
quite abandoned these), a mother and daughter who, having lost their
means, have taken to a questionable, or rather a very unquestionable
manner of life, keeping a sort of private gaming-house, and extending to
those frequenters of it who choose, what the late George Augustus Sala
not inelegantly called, in an actual police-court instance, "the
thoroug