In the preface to his History of Italian Painting he quoted Alfieri: "My only reason for writing was that my gloomy age afforded me no other occupation." From Cività Vecchia he wrote: "It's awful: women here have only one idea, a new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable company--except with prisoners; with whom, as French Consul, I cannot possibly seek friendship." To kill the ennui of his existence he either slipped into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," most of which he never saw in print. Among certain intellectual circles in Paris he was known and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of the seven arts, though his lack of original invention occasionally got him into scrapes. Stendhal might have echoed Molière's "Je prends mon bien où je le trouve"; but he would not have forgotten to remind the dramatic poet that the very witticism was borrowed from Cyrano. Stryienski's Soirées du Stendhal Club actually presents for the delectation of the Stendhalians parallel columns from Lanzi and Stendhal--so proud are the true believers of the fold that even such evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert them. The cribbing occurs in the general reflections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as plain as a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can read Stendhal with more interest than the original. His lively spirit adorns Lanzi's laborious pages. Beyle's joke about the "reversed engines of Christianity," quoted by Mérimée, and his implacable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir--in those days the Yellow Peril was the Jesuits), did not dull his perception of what the papacy had done for art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence in his Philosophy of Art (which Taine appreciated and profited by) when writing of the popes of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the vivifying and reforming influence of the Church at this period upon the brutality and lusts of the nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring Raphael as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, he declared that Raphael failed in _chiaroscuro_ and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in this particular. But he did not deign to mention Rembrandt. Nothing Germanic or Northern pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and his passion for Italy and the Italians was not assumed. He had asked of his executor that he be buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Rome. Then he changed his mind and ordered that the cemetery of Andilly, near Montmorency, be his last resting-place. But the fates, that burn into ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, Paris, where still stands the prosaic tomb with its falsification of the writer's birth. His epitaph he doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of Haydn. In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, scripsi, vixi." And when we consider the fact that his happiest years were in Milan, that there