Mérimée gives his tales no more background than an Englishman could put without immodesty into an after-dinner conversation. He does not decorate them with words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by rhythm or any other of the subtler uses of language. He does not laugh at his jokes, nor, in moments of pathos, show any mist in his eyes. The only openly personal touches in his stories are those sentences of irony as poignant as those of another great conversationalist, whose _Modest Proposal_ for the eating of little children is scarcely more cruel than _Mateo Falcone_. His style is without felicities. It has none of the Oriental pomp of Gautier's prose, none of the torrential eloquence of Hugo's; but its limitations are its virtues. Pomp is the ruin of a plain fact as of a plain man, and rhetoric rolls facts along too fast to do anything but smooth them. This style, that seems to disclaim any pretension to be a style at all, leaves facts unencumbered, with their corners unpolished. It emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that he is not a story-teller, and so helps to betray us into his power. But I cannot understand those critics who find it a style of clear glass that shows us facts through no personality whatever. Always, in reading a Mérimée, I have an impression of listening to a man who has seen the world, and was young once upon a time, who loves Brantôme, and who in another century would have been a friend of Anthony Hamilton, and perhaps have written or had a minor part in memoirs like those of the Count Grammont. And this man is the imaginary mouthpiece of English anecdote, the mask handed from speaker to speaker at an English dinner-table. [Mérimée's _anglomanie_.]