"Carmen," M. Merimee's latest production, appeared a few months since in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, which appears to have got the monopoly of his pen, as it has of many of the cleverest pens in France. "Carmen" is a graceful and animated sketch, in style as brilliant as anything by the same author--in the character of its incidents less strikingly original than some of his other tales. It is a story of Spanish life, not in cities and palaces, in court or camp, but in the barranca and the forest, the gipsy suburb of Seville, the woodland bivouac and smuggler's lair. Carmen is a gipsy, a sort of Spanish Esmeralda, but without the good qualities of Hugo's charming creation. She has no Djali; she is fickle and mercenary, the companion of robbers, the instigator of murder. She inveigles a young soldier from his duty, leads him into crime, deceives and betrays him, and finally meets her death at his hand. M. Merimee has been much in Spain, and--unlike some of his countrymen, who apparently go thither with the sole view of spying out the nakedness of the land and making odious comparisons, and who, in their excess of patriotic egotism, prefer Versailles to the Alhambra, and the Bal Mabille to a village _fandango_--he has a vivid perception of the picturesque and characteristic, of the _couleur locale_, to use the French term, whether in men or manners, scenery or costume, and he embodies his impressions in pointed and sparkling phrase. As an antiquarian and linguist, he unites qualities precious for the due appreciation of Spain. Well-versed in the Castilian, he also displays a familiarity with the Cantabrian tongue--that strange and difficult _Vascuense_ which the Evil One himself, according to a provincial proverb, spent seven years of fruitless labour in endeavouring to acquire. And he patters Romani, the mysterious jargon of the gitanos, in a style no way inferior--so far as we can discover--to Bible Borrow himself. That gentleman, by the bye, when next he goes a missionarying, would find M. Merimee an invaluable auxiliary, and the joint narrative of their adventures would doubtless be in the highest degree curious. The grave earnestness of the Briton would contrast curiously with the lively half-scoffing tone of the witty and learned Frenchman. Indeed, there would be danger of persons of such opposite character falling out upon the road, and fighting a mortal duel, with the king of the gipsies for bottle-holder. The proverbial jealousy between persons of the same trade might prove another motive of strife. Both are dealers in the romantic. And "Carmen," related as the personal experience of the author during an archaeological tour in Andalusia the autumn of 1830, is as graphic and fascinating as any chapters of the great tract-monger's remarkable wanderings. FOOTNOTES: [B] It was a rule with the _raffines_ not to commence a new quarrel so long as there was an old one to terminate. HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE AND LIVE IN IT. NO. III.