Note that I say man of the world; for precision, simple naturalness, and brevity, though they may be admired by the sensuous and picturesque prose authors of a later day and their public, are not the qualities most highly valued by them. The ordinary well-educated Frenchman, on the other hand, likes a story and dislikes description; he is, unconsciously, a firm adherent of the principles propounded in Lessing's _Laokoon_, a genuine worshipper of common-sense, who sneers at the Romantic and naturalistic mania for description, and has always infinitely preferred Voltaire's style to Diderot's. The writer who, without confusing his general impression, presents as many facts as possible in the narrowest possible space, approaches the artistic ideal of the average educated man, nay, attains it when, as in Mérimée's case, he combines with this compactness absolute self-control in the matter of tone and style. The older generation in France, to whom the word "Romanticism" has gradually become almost the equivalent of bombastic rhodomontade, can hardly understand how Mérimée was ever reckoned among the Romanticists; they acknowledge that he took part in the first Romantic campaign, but insist that this happened partly by mistake. Jules Sandeau, in welcoming Louis de Loménie, Mérimée's successor in the Académie Française, related, in order to show the kind of Romanticist Mérimée had been, the old anecdote of the gentleman who, during the Revolution of July, impatiently seized the gun of one of the insurrectionists who could not shoot, aimed at a Swiss soldier posted at one of the windows of the Tuileries, shot him dead, and then politely replied to the entreaties of the insurgent that he should keep the weapon which he used so skilfully: "Many thanks, but, to tell the truth, I am a royalist." Mérimée was, Sandeau thus implied, always a Classicist; if, in the first stage of his career, he almost outdid the Romanticists, it was only because he could not withstand the temptation to show them how to shoot. The idea underlying this amusing exaggeration is, however, anything but correct. It is easy to prove that Mérimée, in spite of the classic severity of his style, is in many respects a typical representative of the French Romantic tendency. The more we study his character the more convinced of this do we become.