It is his passion for strength in its primitive nakedness which endows him with the historical sense. Hence the heroes of his historical works are always the wildest and most daring characters--Sulla, Catilina, Don Pedro the Cruel of Castile, the first pseudo-Demetrius, &c, &c. His conscientious accuracy and his distrust of the part played by imagination in science rob his historical works proper of life (he is most successful in _Don Pedro I._ and _Épisode de l'Histoire de la Russie_); but he at once imparts life to any period which he treats as the imaginative artist. After Vitet had shown, in his masterly _Scènes historiques_, how real history can be presented in a free dramatic rendering, Mérimée gave France, in _La Jaquerie_, the picture of a much earlier and more savage age than that which his forerunner and teacher had subjected to poetic treatment. He aptly indicates the spirit of his work in the ironically applied speech of Molière's Mascarille, which he affixes to it as motto: "C'est mon talent particulier, et je travaille à mettre en madrigaux toute l'histoire romaine." He has entered with wonderful understanding into the customs and follies, views and prejudices, which constituted the spirit of that far-off age. Let us take one character as an instance--Isabella, daughter of the Baron d'Apremont, a typical high-minded, amiable young girl of the feudal period. Her heart is pure, her morals are of the strictest, she is merciful to the suffering and the vanquished. To the brave and faithful man-at-arms who goes through fire and water for her sake she is very gracious; she begs her father to give her this serf, and in gratitude to him for having saved her life she makes him her equerry; she even embroiders him a purse. But he dares to love her; and then everything is at an end. She overwhelms him with contemptuous reproaches, repulses him with scorn, and considers herself degraded by his having dared to lift up his eyes to her. Compare this lady with one of Ingemann's noble maidens; imagine how the latter, scorning all the prejudices of her day, would have valued the noble heart which beat under the simple jerkin; and note the difference between an idealistic and a bold, historically accurate representation of a coarse and vigorous age. One more example--the scene which takes place at night in front of a lonely hut in the forest, to which the brutal English freebooter-chief, Siward, has conveyed Isabella, whom he has carried off after the assault in which her father has been killed. The whole is nothing but the conversation of two troopers who are holding the saddled horses at the door, and pass the time in talking of the act of violence which is being committed within. But the impression produced is so vivid that it stamps on our minds a picture of the whole age. It is, however, a fault in this work, that the author, in his aversion for sentimentality, has crowded together so many cruel and horrible actions, that in the