willingly, the faithful animal hesitates between the two, and maintains an attitude of strict but friendly neutrality. Lastly, there is a child’s miniature which neither will consent to part with; and thus, little by little, the impossibility of the separation is made manifest. The young man takes the young woman with him to Italy. But he wins his bet all the same, for he is accompanied not by his mistress but by his wife. As a counterpart to this work, in which an immoral situation is rectified by the simplest means, may be taken M. Emile Augier’s _Mariage d’Olympe_, in which a similar situation is, by similar means, made to yield terrible and tragic results. Only M. Augier’s young woman happens to be not at all the same sort of person as M. Gozlan’s young woman; so that whereas to abandon the one would have been culpable and foolish, to introduce the other into decent society was reckless and criminal. Dumas showed before long a disposition to turn, not against his own views, but of views supposed to be his. Whatever allowances might be made for a woman in the position of Marguerite Gauthier, a real wife ought not, according to his very original idea, to deceive her husband. He exhibited, in _Diane de Lys_, a lady who took this liberty, and who was shot in consequence by her justly indignant spouse. M. Dumas’ _Fils Naturel_, in which a father disavows his son, until at last the young man finds himself in such a position that he can in his turn disavow his father, gave rise to a good many pieces on the same subject. The half-a-dozen or dozen plays in which it is shown that irregular relations between men and women are likely to have awkward consequences, are, as studies of social problems, scarcely worth dwelling upon. Every one knows that (as in _La Fiammina_) the son of a prima donna who has misconducted herself may find difficulties in his way when he proposes to marry a girl whose parents are eminently respectable; and we need no sensational dramatist to teach us (as in _Coralie_), that an officer whose mother has amassed a large fortune by the most shameful means may, in spite of his personal merits, meet with slights and indignities.