contradictory affinities of his mind. Our author, as we have said, is a poet, and even if his verses seem at times a little thin and rhetorical, they prove abundantly what is evident also in his prose, namely, that he has keen sensations, that images impress themselves upon him with force, and that any scene whose elements are gorgeous and picturesque or which is weighted with tragic emotion, holds his attention and awakens in him the impulse to literary expression. But this plastic impulse is not powerful, or finds in the environment insufficient support. Great art and great creative achievements are rare in the world, and come for the most part only in those moments and in those places where an unusual concentration of mental energy and the friction of many kindred minds allow the scattered sparks of inspiration to merge and to leap into flame. We need not wonder, therefore, that the æsthetic sensibility of our author is greater than his artistic success. Of which of our contemporaries might we not say the same thing? Jean Lahor's attention is analytic; he is absorbed by his model, he does not absorb it and master it by his art. He has not enough vigour and determination of thought to create eternal forms out of the swift hints of perception. He watches rather passively the flight of his ideas, conscious of their vivacity, of their beauty, but most of all, alas! of their flight. His last word as an observer, his message as a poet, is that all things are illusion. They fade, they pass into one another, the place thereof knows them no more. Nothing of them remains, absolutely nothing, save the universal indeterminate force that breeds and devours them perpetually. A mind thus gifted and thus limited would naturally feel its affinity to Oriental pantheism as soon as that phase of thought and feeling came within the radius of its vision. Jean Lahor seems early to have felt an attraction toward the speculation of the East, and his prolonged study of that literature could of course only intensify the natural bent of his mind, and give his thought a more pronounced pantheistic colouring. Had he been wholly absorbed, however, in such mystical contemplation, we should have had little to study in him that was new; only one more case of sensibility and fancy overpowering a timid intellect, one more gifted nature arrested at the stage of bewilderment.