The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the _Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever was tried on the actual stage--it is said without success--though surely this cannot have been the form that it took in _La Perichole_, not the least amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust the Pharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. _Le Carrosse_ itself is a charming thing--very, very merry and by no means unwise--without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, very nearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. _La Famille Carvajal_ has the same fault of gruesomeness as _La Jacquerie_, with less variety, and _Une Femme est un Diable_, a fresh handling of something like the theme of _Le Diable Amoureux_ and _The Monk_, if better than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But _L'Occasion_ is almost great, and I think _Le Ciel et l'Enfer_ absolutely deserves that too much lavished ticket. Indeed Dona Urraca in this, like La Perichole in _Le Carrosse_, seems to me to put Merimee among the greatest masters of feminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some others who have been held to have reached that perilous position. At the same time, this hybrid form between _nouvelle_ and _drame_ has some illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuate character," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; and though in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put a higher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely in this particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same, Merimee's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to his achievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, I should be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" in fiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of others better than any of his. * * * * * [Sidenote: Musset: charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narration unsuccessful.] By an interesting but not at all inexplicable contrast the only writer of prose fiction (except those to whom separate chapters have been allotted and one other who follows him here) to be in any way classed with Merimee and Gautier as a man of letters generally--Alfred de Musset--displays the contrast of values in his work of narrative and dramatic form in exactly the opposite way to (at least) Merimee's. Musset's _Proverbes_, though, I believe, not quite successful at first, have ever since been the delight of all but vulgar stage-goers: they have, from the very first, been the delight of all but vulgar readers for their pure story interest. Even some poems, not given as intended dramas at all, possess the most admirable narrative quality and story-turn.