that the philistine was haunted by the thought of his neighbour because he desired to imitate him, Beyle because he wished to defy or avoid him. This eternal antagonism to the philistine is a genuinely Romantic trait. And it is also characteristically Romantic, that the man who was perpetually preaching and lauding naturalness and unconstraint should all his life have had a passion for concealment, disguise, and mystification, for hiding his personal experiences and thoughts under layer upon layer of wrappings and drapery. Beyle's early years had been passed in profound spiritual solitude. An overflowing fount of feeling had been turned inwards. The child who had lost his mother, and who hated and was hated by his father, learned early to look upon himself as different from others--no doubt also as superior to others, though he defined his superiority as unlikeness.[2] He was conscious that this unlikeness would exclude him from any general sympathy and prevent his being generally understood. Hence his desire that it were possible for him to write his books in a language which should only be understood by a chosen few--a sacred language. Hence also his wish to find "un lecteur unique, unique dans tous les sens," and his dedication of _La Chartreuse de Parme_: "To the happy few." This, too, was the real source of the inclination to concealment. Not only did Beyle publish all his books under a pseudonym (all, with one exception, under the name of _De Stendhal_, presumably derived from Stendal in Prussia, the birthplace of Winckelmann), but in many of them, _De l'Amour_ among the rest, the pseudonymous author assumes any number of second pseudonyms. Any sentiment which he does not care to acknowledge as his own, any anecdote which might shed light upon his private life, is laid to the account of an Albéric, or a Lisio, or the amiable Colonel So and So. And he has given himself as many occupations as names; now he is a cavalry officer, now an ironmonger, now a customs officer, now a commercial traveller; here he figures as a man, there as a woman; at one time he is of noble, at another of plebeian birth; at one time English, at another Italian. He would have liked to write in a cipher language for the initiated. This delight in leading his readers on the wrong track is in part to be ascribed to the secretiveness of the diplomatist; but in his private correspondence it was also due to a suspicion of the police which almost amounted to a mania. In his youth Beyle had made acquaintance with both Napoleon's and the Austrian police, and he always retained a fear of his letters being seized and opened. Therefore he hardly ever signed a private letter with his name. I have counted in his correspondence more than seventy pseudonymous signatures, varying from the strangest to the most ordinary names--Conickphile, Arnolphe II, C. de Seyssel, Chopin d'Ornonville, Toricelli, François Durand, &c, &c. He sometimes subscribes himself