At one time in England--I cannot speak for the times of his greatest popularity in France--Paul de Kock's name, except for a vague knowledge of his grisette and _mauvais sujet_ studies, was very mainly connected with _Le Barbier de Paris_. It was an instance of the constant mistakes which almost all countries make about foreign authors. I imagine, from a fresh and recent reading of it, that he probably did take more trouble with it than with most of his books. But, unfortunately, instances of lost labour are not confined to literature. The subject and the author are very ill matched. It is a romance of 1632, and so in a way competing with the most successful efforts of the great Romantics. But for such a task Paul had no gifts, except his invariable one of concocting a readable story. As for style, imagination, atmosphere, and such high graces, it would be not so much cruel as absurd to "enter" the book with _Notre-Dame de Paris_ or the _Contes Drolatiques_, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ or the _Chronique de Charles IX_. But even the lower ways he could not tread here. He did not know anything about the time, and his wicked Marquis de Villebelle is not early Louis Treize at all, but rather late Louis Quinze. He had not the gift (which Scott first showed and Dumas possessed in no small measure) of writing his conversations, if not in actual temporal colour of language, at any rate in a kind of _lingua franca_ suitable to, or at the worst not flagrantly discordant with, _any_ particular time and _any_ particular state of manners. He could throw in types of the kind so much admired by no less a person than Sir Philip Sidney--a garrulous old servant, an innocent young girl, a gasconading coward, a revengeful daughter of Italy, a this and that and the other. But he could neither make individual character nor vivid historical scene. And so the thing breaks down.