I need not take into account his Latin learning, his Jesuitical casuistry, his erudite reference to Electra; nor his ambiguous but not enigmatical linking together of the names of Orestes and Electra, to make it positively certain that the three poems were inspired by the same woman to whom _Le paradis_ is dedicated. Like Orestes, he might have desired vengeance, as the fugitive did for his murdered father; she, like Electra, might have said, in Sophocles' words: "And my wretched couch in yonder house of woe knows well, ere now, how I keep the watches of the night--how often I bewail my hapless sin." I find exactly the same feeling in the sentences I have given of the dedication as in Electra's speech: nights of weariness and of lamentation. And Orestes exiled is ever in her thoughts. Why not in J. G. F.'s? In 1859 Poulet-Malassis printed: _Théophile Gautier, par Charles Baudelaire;_ a book of 68 pages; certainly full of perfect praise, as only one so infinitely greater than the writer he writes about was capable of giving. The first question the oriental-looking Gautier asked him was: "Do you love dictionaries?" The reply was instant: "Yes!" As a matter of fact, Gautier knew every word in the French language, even l'_Argot._ Now, as Baudelaire defines the genius of Balzac supremely (more than he ever could have defined the incomparable talents of Gautier), I leave it to Swinburne to speak for me of Baudelaire and of Balzac. "Not for the first," he says, in his _Study of Shakespeare,_ "and probably not for the last time I turn, with all confidence, as well as with reverence, for illustration and confirmation of my own words, to the exquisite critical genius of a long honoured and long lamented fellow-craftsman. The following admirable and final estimate of the more special element or peculiar quality in the intellectual force of Honoré de Balzac could only have been taken by the inevitable intuition and rendered by the subtlest eloquence of Charles Baudelaire. Nothing could more aptly and perfectly illustrate the definition indicated in my text between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.