[1] Expressions of Gottfried Keller's. [2] The inscription on his tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre, directions for which were contained in his will, shows what a hold Milan had on him to the last. It runs: ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE SCRISSE AMO VISSE ANN. LIX M. II MORI IL XXIII MARZO M.D.CCC.XLII. XIX BEYLE Henri Beyle's is, without doubt, one of the most complex minds of the rich period to which he belongs. What chiefly distinguishes him from his brethren of the Romantic School is his direct intellectual descent from the severely rational sensationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century. Not even in any short youthful or transition period is there a trace to be found in his soul of the Romantic reverence for religious tradition so prevalent in his day. All his life long he was the unfaltering philosophic antagonist of everything in the great Romantic movement which was of the nature of a reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. He was absolutely uninfluenced by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël--was neither a colourist like the former nor eloquent like the latter; and absolutely uninfluenced by André Chénier, Hugo, and Lamartine--for he was wanting in the sense of metre, and was neither lyric nor pathetic. His models as a Romantic writer were not French; and his allegiance to Condillac and Helvetius, philosphers despised by the Romanticists of every country, never for a moment wavered, even at the time when the prejudice against them was universal. He was a passionate atheist; that is to say, there was in his conviction that the world is not governed by any God the Father, as it were an element of enmity towards the being in whom he did not believe, an indignation at the horrors of life, which found expression in the sad and witty saying: "What excuses God is that he does not exist." Beyle never let slip an opportunity of displaying his dislike of so-called revealed religion. If he had occasion to write "the one true religion," he did not forget to add in parenthesis "(the reader's);" and when he touched on the subject of Christian morality, he was fond of remarking that it might be reduced to the calculation: "It is advisable not to eat truffles; they give you a stomach-ache."