Of all our operas, that which is the most ornamented, or rather the most overloaded, with this epigrammatic spirit, is the ballet of the "Triumph of the Arts," composed by an amiable man, who always thought with subtlety, and expressed himself with delicacy; but who, by the abuse of this talent, contributed a little to the decline of letters after the glorious era of Louis XIV. In this ballet, in which Pygmalion animates his statue, he says to it: _Vos premiers mouvemens ont été de m'aimer._ And love for me your earliest movements showed. I remember to have heard this line admired by some persons in my youth. But who does not perceive that the movements of the body of the statue are here confounded with the movements of the heart, and that in any sense the phrase is not French--that it is, in fact, a pun, a jest? How could it be that a man who had so much wit, had not enough to retrench these egregious faults? This same man--who, despising Homer, translated him; who, in translating him, thought to correct him, and by abridging him, thought to make him read--had a mind to make Homer a wit. It is he who, when Achilles reappears, reconciled to the Greeks who are ready to avenge him, makes the whole camp exclaim: _Que ne vaincra-t-il point? Il s'est vaincu lui-même._ What shall oppose him, conqueror of himself? A man must indeed be fond of witticisms, when he makes fifty thousand men pun all at once upon the same word. This play of the imagination, these quips, these cranks, these random shafts, these gayeties, these little broken sentences, these ingenious familiarities, which it is now the fashion to lavish so profusely, are befitting no works but those of pure amusement. The front of the Louvre, by Perrault, is simple and majestic; minute ornaments may appear with grace in a cabinet. Have as much wit as you will, or as you can, in a madrigal, in light verses, in a scene of a comedy, when it is to be neither impassioned nor simple, in a compliment, in a "novellette," or in a letter, where you assume gayety yourself in order to communicate it to your friends.