Their love of the fact in its simplicity produced in both Beyle and Mérimée a strong aversion for French classic rhetoric; and both are distinguished from all contemporary French Romanticists by the fact that they do not substitute lyric poetry for that rhetoric. Beyle never wrote a line of poetry; he had no ear whatever for rhythm. In spite of the enthusiastic admiration which he imagined he felt for the Italian poets, he regarded metre as merely an assistance to memory, and could see no reason for it in a composition not intended to be learned by rote. Mérimée is characterised by a similar dislike of verse. He had such a repugnance to the effeminate, languishing music of rhyme, that the numerous poems cited in his writings are, without exception, rendered in prose; he preferred letting them lose all their character to translating them in verse. The explanation naturally suggests itself that he did not feel capable of writing poetry. But I am rather of opinion that it was his pride which would not allow him to submit his poetry to the criticism of the public. His _Lettres à une inconnue_ show that he could write English verse, so the question can hardly have been one of inability. But such talent as he had, he did not cultivate; an aversion to display of feeling, a shy reservedness, produced the same practical result as Beyle's want of ear. In this matter, however, as in various others, Mérimée outdoes his master. In the depths of Beyle's soul there was a lyric tendency; it finds its way to the surface in his persistent enthusiasm for Napoleon, for Italy, for the sixteenth century, for Cimarosa and Rossini, Correggio and Canova, and in all the superlatives which flow almost as abundantly from his pen as from Balzac's. Mérimée, on the other hand, not content with banishing the lyric form from his works, entirely abjures the spirit; he walls himself in; no prose is less lyrical than his.