Next to the most admirable of his lyric and elegiac poems, Musset's best _Comedies_ and _Proverbes_ (proverbial sayings exemplified in dramatic action), deserve a place. Written in prose for readers of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, their scenic qualities were discovered only in 1847, when the actress Madame Allan presented _Un Caprice_ and _Il faut qu'une Porte soit ouverte ou fermee_ at St. Petersburg. The ambitious Shakespearian drama of political conspiracy, _Lorenzaccio_, was an effort beyond the province and the powers of Musset. His _Andre del Sarto_, a tragic representation of the great painter betrayed by his wife and his favourite pupil, needed the relief of his happier fantasy. It is in such delicate creations of a world of romance, a world of sunshine and of perpetual spring, as _On ne badine pas avec l'Amour_, _Les Caprices de Marianne_, _Le Chandelier_, _Il ne faut jurer de rien_, that Musset showed how romantic art could become in a high sense classic by the balance of sensibility and intelligence, of fantasy and passion. The graces of the age of Madame de Pompadour ally themselves here with the freer graces of the Italian Renaissance. Something of the romance of Shakespeare's more poetic comedies mingles with the artificial elegance of Marivaux. Their subject is love, and still repeated love; sentiment is relieved by the play of gaiety; the grotesque approaches the beautiful; we sail in these light-timbered barques to a land that lies not very far from the Illyria and Bohemia and Arden forest of our own great enchanter. VI Lyrical self-confession reached its limit in the poetry of Musset. Detachment from self and complete surrender to the object is the law of Gautier's most characteristic work; he is an eye that sees, a hand that moulds and colours--that is all. A child of the South, born at Tarbes in 1811, THEOPHILE GAUTIER was a pupil in the painter Rioult's studio till the day when, his friend the poet Gerard de Nerval having summoned him to take part in the battle of _Hernani_, he swore by the skull from which Byron drank that he would not be a defaulter. His first volume, _Poesies_, appeared in 1830, and was followed in two years by _Albertus_, a fantastic manufacture of strangeness and horror, amorous sorcery, love-philtres, witches' Sabbaths. The _Comedie de la Mort_ evokes the illustrious shades of Raphael, Faust, Don Juan to testify to the vanity of knowledge and glory and art and love. Gautier's romantic enthusiasm was genuine and ardent. The _Orientales_ was his poetic gospel; but the _Orientales_ is precisely the volume in which Hugo is least effusive, and pursues art most exclusively for art's sake. Love and life and death in these early poems of Gautier are themes into which he works coloured and picturesque details; sentiment, ideas are of value to him so far as they can be rendered in images wrought in high relief and tinctured with vivid pigments.