The final evidence of Mérimée's discreet reserve is to be found in the classically elegant severity of his style. It is smooth and bright as polished steel--not an ornament, not a flower, not a fanciful decoration of any kind; every figure is of beaten metal, accurately proportioned, and as correctly attired as it is life-like. No contemporary French author displayed such aristocratic conservatism in the matter of new words and expressions as Mérimée, not even Charles Nodier. Mérimée used the language which he found ready to his hand, and set his mark upon every sentence he wrote, without employing a single out-of-the-way word, or a single ordinary word in an unusual manner. But he shunned conventional expressions, phrases which throw a veil over the thought, beneath which it looks larger and more important. What especially distinguishes him is his sure touch, his gift of producing with some simple, almost worn-out, word exactly the impression which he desires. Hugo's style is graphic and pathetic, Gautier's (and that of his followers) is sensuous and loaded with imagery--both tried to produce an effect by word-architecture. The masters were justified in the attempt; but the attempts of their imitators and pupils too often recall those magnificent aqueducts which the Romans built with a prodigious expenditure of money and labour to connect one height with another, because they did not know that the force of the water itself was sufficient to raise it from the valley. We admire these mighty erections, but our admiration would have been greater if instead of them we had found simple pipes carried along the ground. The artificial, high-flown expression is like the aqueduct, the simple word that goes straight to the point, like the humble pipe. Mérimée's style, like the pipe, keeps close to the ground, has no useless ornament and no unnecessary loftiness; there is no strength wasted. It is not on this account a style destitute of charm, but it has no other except that of exactly adequate strength. There is not a word too much, and every sentence is in the service of the whole. The old motto, _Ne quid nimis_, might have been the author's device. Mérimée's aim in evolving such a style evidently was to make his small works of art, by the renunciation of everything superfluous, as invulnerable as possible to the tooth of time. His endeavour reminds us of what is told of Donatello. The characteristic position of that artist's incomparable St. George--arms and hands close to the body--is said to have been chosen after a careful investigation of the condition of the famous statues of antiquity with the view of ascertaining which parts of them had suffered most, and why. In much the same way, Mérimée has tried to insure his works against the change in taste which time brings about, by keeping them free from every ornamental projection, everything in the nature of a digression.