The best collection of Nodier's short tales contains nine pieces: _Trilby_, _Le Songe d'Or_, _Baptiste Montauban_, _La Fee aux Miettes_, _La Combe de l'Homme mort_, _Ines de las Sierras_, _Smarra_, _La Neuvaine de la Chandeleur_, and _La Legende de Soeur Beatrix_. Of these I believe _Trilby_, _La Fee aux Miettes_, and _Smarra_ have been the greatest favourites, and were pretty certainly the most influential in France. My own special delights are _Le Songe d'Or_, _Ines de las Sierras_, and _Soeur Beatrix_, with part of the _Fee_. But none is without its attractions, and the Preface to the _Fee aux Miettes_, which is almost a separate piece, has something of the quintessential in that curious quality which Nodier possesses almost alone in French or with Gerard de Nerval and Louis Bertrand only. English readers may "perceive a good deal of [Charles] Lamb in it," with touches of Sterne and De Quincey and Poe. [Sidenote: _Trilby._] It is much to be feared that more people in England nowadays associate the name of "Trilby" with the late Mr. Du Maurier than with Nodier, and that more still associate it with the notion of a hat than with either of the men of genius who used it in literature. So mighty Byron, dead and turned to clay, Gave name to collars for full many a day; And Ramillies, grave of Gallic boasts so big, Found most perpetuation in a wig.[82] The original story united divers attractions for its first readers in 1822, combining the older fashion of Ossian with the newer one of Scott, infusing the supernatural, which was one great bait of the coming Romanticism, and steeping the whole cake in the tears of the newer rather than the older "Sensibility." "Trilby, le Lutin d'Argail"[83] (Nodier himself explains that he alters the spelling here with pure phonetic intent, so as to keep the pronunciation for French eyes _and_ ears[84]), is a spirit who haunts the cabin of the fisherman Dougal to make a sort of sylph-like love to his wife Jeannie. He means and does no harm, but he is naturally a nuisance to the husband, on whom he plays tricks to keep him away from home, and at length rather frightens the wife. They procure, from a neighbouring monastery, a famous exorcist monk, who, though he cannot directly punish Trilby, lays on him sentence of exclusion from the home of the pair, unless one of them invites him, under penalty of imprisonment for a thousand years. How the story turns to Jeannie's death and Trilby's duress can be easily imagined, and may be read with pleasure. I confess that to me it seems pretty, but just a little mawkish.[85] Perhaps I am a brute. [Sidenote: _Le Songe d'Or._]