Merimee's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction--the _Chronique de Charles IX_--has been rather variously judged. That the present writer once translated the whole of it may, from different points of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualification for judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there are unfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be one or the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored by his occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of an expert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many books to an even keel between _engouement_ and disgust, it certainly should not be a _dis_qualification. I do not think that the _Chronique_, as a romance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas so fortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely a success. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in his two Dalilahs--the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen, and the great lady--and in his fear-neither-God-nor-Devil brother; good scenes in the massacre and in other passages also. But as a whole--as a modernised _roman d'adventures_--it does not exactly _run_: the reader does not devour the story as he should. He may be--I am--delighted with the way in which the teller tells; but the things which he tells are of much less interest. One cannot exactly say with that acute critic (if rather uncritical acceptor of the accomplished facts of life and death and matrimony), Queen Gertrude of Denmark, "More matter with less art," for there is plenty of matter as well as amply sufficient and yet not over-lavish art. But one is not made to take sufficient interest in the particular matter supplied. [Sidenote: The semi-dramatic stories. _La Jacquerie._]