is puzzled to distinguish the one from the other. It is a world of exquisite, delicately depraved beings trembling with sensibility. Irony is their breath of life, paradox their common speech. And the wizard who has raised these ghosts seems to stand aside and regard them with a sarcastic smile. What is Villiers' view of life? it may occur to us to ask; is he on the side of the angels? That is a question it is premature to answer; I have to look next on another and a widely different aspect of the fantastic edifice of his work. The group of tales I have been considering reveals the humorist in his capacity of ironical observer: their wit is a purely impersonal mockery, they deal with life from the point of view of the artist, and they are pre-eminently artistic, free from any direct purpose or preoccupation. In the pseudo-scientific burlesques, and the kindred satires on ignorant and blatant mediocrity, the smile of the Comic Muse has given place to "Laughter holding both his sides;" absurdity caps absurdity, order and measure seem to be flung to the winds, and in this new Masque of Anarchy sharp blows are given, the jests are barbed, and they fly not quite at random. "L'Esprit du siècle," says Villiers, "ne l'oublions pas, est aux machines." And it is in the mechanical miracles of modern science that he has found a new and unworked and inexhaustible field of satire. Jules Verne has used these new discoveries with admirable skill in his tales of extravagant wonder; Villiers seizes them as a weapon, and in his hands it becomes deadly, and turns back upon the very age which forged it; as a means of comedy, and the comedy becomes soberly Rabelaisian, boisterous and bitter at once, sparing nothing, so that he can develop the deliberate plan of "an apparatus for the chemical analysis of the last sigh," make a sober proposal for the utilization of the sky as a means of advertisement (_Affichage Céleste_), and describe in all its detail and through all its branches the excellent invention of Bathybius Bottom, _La machine à gloire,_ a mechanical contrivance for obtaining dramatic success with the expense and inconvenience of that important institution, the Claque. In these wild and whirling satires, which are at bottom as cold and biting as Swift, we have a quite new variety of style, a style of patchwork and grimaces. Familiar words take new meanings, and flash through all the transformations of the pantomime before our eyes; strange words start up from forgotten corners; words and thoughts, never brought together since Babel, clash and stumble into a protesting combination; and in the very aspect of the page there is something startling. The absurdity of these things is so extreme, an absurdity so supremely serious, that we are carried almost beyond laughter, and on what is by virtue of its length the most important of the scientific burlesques, _L'Ève future,_ it is almost impossible to