his election, on the 21st of May 1891, to the French Academy. In 1892 he published _Fantôme d'orient_, another dreamy study of life in Constantinople, a sort of continuation of _Aziyadé_. He described a visit to the Holy Land, somewhat too copiously, in three volumes (1895-1896), and wrote a novel, _Ramuntcho_ (1897), a story of manners in the Basque province, which is equal to his best writings. In 1900 he visited British India, with the view of describing what he saw; the result appeared in 1903--_L'Inde_ (_sans les Anglais_). At his best Pierre Loti was unquestionably the finest descriptive writer of the day. In the delicate exactitude with which he reproduced the impression given to his own alert nerves by unfamiliar forms, colours, sounds and perfumes, he was without a rival. But he was not satisfied with this exterior charm; he desired to blend with it a moral sensibility of the extremest refinement, at once sensual and ethereal. Many of his best books are long sobs of remorseful memory, so personal, so intimate, that an English reader is amazed to find such depth of feeling compatible with the power of minutely and publicly recording what is felt. In spite of the beauty and melody and fragrance of Loti's books his mannerisms are apt to pall upon the reader, and his later books of pure description were rather empty. His greatest successes were gained in the species of confession, half-way between fact and fiction, which he essayed in his earlier books. When all his limitations, however, have been rehearsed, Pierre Loti remains, in the mechanism of style and cadence, one of the most original and most perfect French writers of the second half of the 19th century. Among his later works were: _La Troisième jeunesse de Mme Prune_ (1905); _Les Désenchantées_ (1906, Eng. trans. by C. Bell); _La Mort de Philae_ (1908); _Judith Renaudin_ (Théâtre Antoine, 1904), a five-act historical play based on an earlier book; and, in collaboration with Émile Vedel, a translation of _King Lear_, also produced at the Théâtre Antoine in 1904. (E. G.)