work, The Lives of Haydn and Mozart par Louis Alexander Bombet. This pseudonym is partly due to Beyle's habitual mania for anonymity and partly to the consciousness that the substantial portion of the work had been coolly plagiarised from Carpani. Nor do any morbid pangs of conscience appear to have ruffled the serenity of the author, who found a precedent for his action in the plagiarisms of Molière and a subsequent justification in the money that he obtained. Emboldened indeed by his success he published in London, in 1817, a series of travel sketches, Rome, Naples, and Florence, which owed in some places an unacknowledged debt to the Italian Travels of Goethe. Yet even so, viewed as a whole the book possesses a richness of material, a raciness of observation, a joy of journeying, a spontaneity of verve which give it a high rank among travel literature and make it eminently readable even at the present day. Less a guide-book than a personal narrative, it describes the actual life of the period as actually lived by a man who plumed himself at thirty on still retaining all the folly of his youth. The author was an enthusiast for the theatre, a devotee of the ballet, and a keen wagerer of those exquisite ices which formed one of the chief allurements of the Scala Theatre. An enthusiastic anti-clerical and an eager reader of forbidden political plays at midnight côteries, he yet feels on visiting the Church of the Jesuits "a little of that respect which even the most criminal power inspires when it has done great things." And how simply natural is the following confession of a traveller's faith: "I experience a sensation of happiness on my journeys which I have found nowhere else, even in the most happy days of my ambition." In the same year, 1817, Stendhal published his History of Painting in Italy. This book is remarkable, not so much by its purely æsthetic criticism as by the application to the sphere of artistic criticism of those theories of heredity, climate, and environment which were afterwards to be so brilliantly exploited at the hands of Taine. Some mention should also be made of that simplicity of lyric fervour which distinguishes the extremely fine dedication to Napoleon.

In 1821 much to his disgust, Stendhal, accused, and apparently quite unjustly, of being a French spy, was forced to leave Milan. This exile was all the more irksome as Stendhal's amoristic history had now reached its great climax. If Louason had constituted the initiation of his youth, Mme. Daru the acme of his social achievement, and the Countess Pietragrua the incarnate realisation of his adventurous search for ideal beauty, it was in Mèthilde, Countess Dembowska, that his mature heart found a passion which though always ungratified remained none the less grand. It is instructive to observe how honest was the love, how deep the devotion of this official rake for "une femme que j'adorais, qui m'aimait et qui ne s'est jamais donnée a moi." Particularly significant is it that this man, whose cynicism had gained for him the sobriquet of Don Juan, should have condemned himself to a three years' fidelity that thereby he might become more worthy of that "âme angélique cachée dans un si beau corps qui quittait la vie en 1825." But it is even more interesting to notice how there mingles with this perfectly genuine attachment the most morbid self-consciousness and fear of ridicule:

"Le pire des malheurs, m'écriais-je, serait que ces hommes si secs, mes amis au milieu desquels je vais vivre, devinissent ma passion pour une femme que je n'ai pas eue. Cette peur mille fois répétée a été dans le fait la principe dirigeante de ma vie pendant dix ans. C'est par là que je suis venu à avoir de l'esprit, chose qui était la butte de mes mépris à Milan en 1818 quand j'aimais Mèthilde."

In 1822 Stendhal published in Paris that book De l'Amour which he had composed at odd moments during his sojourn at Milan. Thought by the author to be his most important work, and deemed worthy by the public of a total purchase of seventeen copies, the work possesses even at the present day considerable claims upon the attention. For it possesses the unique characteristic of being a treatise on the sexual emotion written by an author who was at the same time an acute psychologist and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by concrete practice, and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself and observed in others into broad general principles. While we do not propose to enter into a detailed analysis of this work, which occupies more than four hundred pages of close print, we may perhaps mention the author's fourfold division of love into "amour-passion, amour-goût, amour physique, amour de vanité."

We would also refer to just a few of the innumerable maxims with which the book is studded, as typical of that naïvely subtle simplicity which is so characteristic of our author:

"L'amour c'est avoir du plaisir à voir, toucher, sentir par tous les sens et d'aussi près que possible un objet aimable et qui nous aime"—"l'amant erre sans cesse entre ces idées: 1. Elle a toutes les perfections. 2. Elle m'aime. 3. Comment faire pour obtenir d'elle la plus grande preuve d'amour possible?" "Tout l'art d'aimer se réduit, ça me semble, à dire exactement à quels degrés d'ivresse le moment comporte, c'est-à-dire en d'autres termes à écouter son âme."

And how curious is the following phrase where the point of view of this cynical roué seems for once quite in accord with that of the more ladylike of our lady novelists: "Le plus grand bonheur qui puisse donner l'amour c'est le premier serrement de main d'une femme qu'on aime."

But the philosophical breadth of the author is perhaps best manifested by that spirit of comparative erotology, which induces him to analyse the various nuances of love all over the world from Boston to Constantinople, while he traces the connection between each particular variation and the climate of the country and the character of the people.

With the habitual cleverness of his tongue exacerbated by the misfortune of his love affair, Stendhal became a distinguished but unpopular figure with the Parisians. Most in his element "in a salon of eight or ten persons where all the women have had lovers, where the conversation is gay and flavoured with anecdote, and when light punch is served at half-past twelve," he was merciless to the philistine and the bore, would rally with tactless truth a highly respectable lady on her liaison with the Archbishop of Paris, and would snub unwelcome declarations with artistic repartee.

Plunging vigorously into the controversy between the Classicism and the Romanticists, Stendhal published in 1825 his celebrated pamphlet Racine and Shakespeare, which denounced the Alexandrine as a cache-sottise and vindicated the live modernity of a present age against the dead orthodoxy of a past generation. This little work, rushed off in a few hours, is one of Stendhal's happiest efforts. The style is bright with a lucid enthusiasm and sharp with a malicious logic. How crisp for instance is the truth of the following:

"Le Viellard—'Continuons.'"

"Le jeune Homme—'Examinons.'"

"Voilà tout le dix-neuvieme siècle."

Shakespeare and Racine was followed by the Life of Rossini, whom Stendhal had known personally at Milan, and by Armance (1827), the first of that series of novels on which the literary fame of Stendhal substantially rests. This work possesses all the essential Stendhalian qualities; the vein of Byronism, the contempt for the bourgeois, the lucid style, and above all the detailed description of what takes place in the