No doubt this and other things are almost direct results of that preference for _recit_ over semi-dramatic evolution of the story by deed and word, which has been noticed. But they are damaging results all the same: and, after making the fairest allowance for its incomplete condition, the thing may be said to support, even more than _Lamiel_ does, the conclusion already based upon the self-published stories (and most of all upon that best of them, _Le Rouge et le Noir_) that Beyle could never have given us a thoroughly hit-off novel. [Sidenote: Beyle's place in the story.] Still, there is always something unfair in making use of "Remains," and for my part I do not think that, unless they are of extraordinary merit, they should ever be published. "Death _should_ clear all scores" in this way as in others. Yet no really critical person will think the worse of Beyle's published work because of these _anecdota_, though they may, as actually before us, be taken as throwing some light on what is not so good in the _publicata_. There can be no doubt that Beyle occupies a very important position in the history of the novel, and not of the French novel only, as the first, or almost the first, analyst of the ugly for fictitious purposes, and as showing singular power in his analysis. Unfortunately his synthetic gifts were not equally great. He had strange difficulty in making his stories _march_; he only now and then got them to _run_; and though the real life of his characters has been acknowledged, it is after all a sort of "Life-in-Death," a new manifestation of the evil power of that mysterious entity whom Coleridge, if he did not discover, first named and produced in quasi-flesh, though he left us without any indication of more than one tiny and accidental part of her dread kingdom.