special type of woman, speculations round a certain strange point of fascination; and they render that particular type with the finest precision. The one may be called a comedy, the other a tragedy. The experiences they record are comic (in the broad sense), certainly, and tragic to the men who undergo them; and in both, under the delicate lightness of the style--the gentle, well-bred, _disengaged_ tone of a _raconteur_ without reserve or after-thought, or with all that scrupulously hid--there is a sort of double irony, a criss-cross and intertexture of meanings and suggestions, a cynicism which turns, in spite of itself, to poetry, or a poetry which is really the other side of cynicism. _La Reine Ysabeau_ and _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes_ sound a new note, the note of horror. The former stands almost by itself in the calm cruelty of its style, the singular precision of the manner in which its atrocious complication of love, vengeance, and fatality is unrolled before our eyes--the something enigmatical in the march of the horrible narrative told almost with tenderness. Its serenity is the last refinement of the irony with which this incredible episode arraigns the justice of things. From the parenthesis of the first sentence to the "Priez pour eux," every touch tells, and every touch is a surprise. Very different, and yet in certain points akin to it, is the strange tale of _Le Convive des Dernières Fêtes,_ perhaps, after the more epic chronicle of _La Reine Ysabeau,_ the finest of Villiers' tales of enigmatical horror. Quietly as the tale is told, full as it is of complications, and developed through varying episodes, it holds us as the Ancient Mariner held the wedding guest. It is with a positive physical sensation that we read it, an instinctive shiver of fascinated and terrified suspense. There is something of the same _frisson_ in the latter part of _Tribulat Bonhomet,_ and in the marvellous little study in the supernatural _L'Intersigne,_ one of the most impressive of Villiers' works. But here the sensation is not due to effects really out of nature; and the element of horror--distinct and peculiar as is the impression it leaves upon the mind--is but one among the many elements of the piece. In these thirty pages we have a whole romance, definitely outlined characters, all touched with the same _bizarrerie_--the execution-mad Baron, Clio la Cendrée, Antoine Chantilly, and Susannah Jackson; the teller of the tale, the vague C., and the fantastic Doctor. Narrow as is the space, it is surcharged with emotion; a word, a look, a smile, a personal taste, is like the touching of an electric button; and, indeed, it is under the electric light that one fancies these scenes to enact themselves--scenes which have as little in common with mere daylight as their personages with average humanity. It is a world in which the virtues have changed their names, and coquette with the vices; and in masque and domino one