Personally characteristic of Mérimée as this tendency undoubtedly was, it is plainly of near kin to a tendency of the whole of that school to which Southey gave the name of the "Satanic." The influence of Byron is unmistakable. By 1830 Frenchmen were thoroughly weary (as Englishmen had been for some time) of the "Immanuelistic" literature of the Reaction. The sceptre of literature had passed from the hands of Lamartine into the hands of Victor Hugo, whose _Orientales_ contain most sanguinary pictures of war and destruction. Lamartine himself, the Seraphic poet in chief, had struck a Satanic note in _La Chute d'un Ange_. And a young poet of Victor Hugo's school was treating gruesome themes in short, artistically finished stories at the same time as Mérimée, and entirely uninfluenced by him. I allude to Petrus Borel, who died poor and unknown. His _Dina, la belle Juive_, will bear comparison with any of Mérimée's tales of horror. Poor Borel was an enthusiast, an ardent moralist, who, concealing his fervour beneath his realism, desired to inspire indignation with the deeds of violence he described. The refined, polished Mérimée is often only pretending to be bloodthirsty because it amuses him to frighten his readers, especially those of the female sex. But in both cases we have also the genuine Romantic defiance of the "bourgeois." Mérimée has not escaped unpunished for thus yielding up his talent to the service of literary bloodthirstiness. Though he avoided his Nemesis during his lifetime, she overtook him after death. When De Loménie pronounced the customary panegyric in the Académie Française, he concluded by expressing the opinion that what was wanting in Mérimée's life was the peace and joy of the domestic hearth--that he would have been happier as the father of a family, "with four or five children to bring up." And when his friend, Countess Lise Przezdzieska, published, under the title of _Lettres à une autre inconnue_, a series of his letters to her which were certainly never intended for publication, she devoted the proceeds of her book to the payment of masses for the soul of her anti-Catholic friend. XXIV MÉRIMÉE