tell whether the author is really in sober earnest or whether the whole thing is a colossal joke. Its 375 pages are devoted to a painfully elaborate description of the manufacture, under the direction of the "très-illustre inventeur américain, M. Edison," of an _artificial woman!_ No such fundamental satire, such ghastly exposure of "poor humanity," has been conceived since Swift. The sweep of it covers human nature, and its essential laughter breaks over the very elements of man. Unfortunately the book is much too long; its own weight sinks it; the details become wearisome, the seriousness of the absurdity palls. So far we have had the humorist, a humorist who appears to be cynic to the backbone, cynic equally in the Parisian perversities of _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre_ and the scientific hilarity of _La machine à gloire._ But we have now to take account of one of those "exceptions" of which I spoke--work which has nothing of the humorist in it, work in which there is not a trace of cynicism, work full of spirituality and all the virtues. _Virginie et Paul_ is a-story of young love comparable only with that yet lovelier story, the magical chapter, in _Richard Feverel._ This Romeo and Juliet are both fifteen, and their little moment of lovers' chat, full of the poetry of the most homely and natural things, is brought before us in a manner so exquisitely true, so perfectly felt, that it is not even sentimental. Every word is a note of music, a song of nightingales among the roses--; _per amica silentia lunæ_--and there is not a wrong note in it, no exaggeration, nothing but absolute truth and beauty. The strange and charming little romance of _L'Inconnue_ is another of these tales of ingenuous love, full of poetry fresh from lovers' hearts, and with a delicate rhythmical effect in its carefully modulated, style. _L'Amour Suprême,_ a less perfect work of art, exhales the same aroma of tender and etherealized affection--an adoring and almost mystic love of the ideal incarnated in woman. In the bizarre narrative of _Véra,_ which recalls the supernatural romances of Poe, there is again this strange spirituality of tone; and in the dazzling prose poem of _Akëdysséril_--transfigured prose glowing with Eastern colour, a tale of old-world passion full of barbaric splendour, and touched, for all its remoteness, with the human note--in this epic fragment, considered in France, I believe, to be, in style at least, Villiers' masterpiece, it is humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal that we contemplate. Humanity transfigured in the light of the ideal!--think for a moment of _Les demoiselles de Bienfilâtre,_ of _L'Analyse chimique du dernier soupir!_ What, then, are we to believe? Has Villiers two natures, and can he reconcile irréconciliable opposites? Or if one is the real man, which one? And what of the other? What, in a word, is the true Villiers? "For, as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."