another handkerchief, as the first is stained with blood; again one of the conspirators goes, leaving the others in anxious suspense. It is a masterly representation, this of Vitet's, of the restlessness, impatience, and foolish feeling of shame which at times overcome us and impel us to rush blindly into the most hazardous situations, merely to escape from painfully ridiculous ones. The messenger sent for the handkerchief again delays. Then the proud Guise loses patience. With the words, "I cannot keep the King waiting longer," he goes out at the door; as it closes behind him, a dozen officers thrust their long poniards into his body. We observe that Vitet enters into details which would be unsuitable for the stage. His _Scènes dramatiques_ are only intended to be read. Therefore they are not genuine dramas. And the explanation of this is, that Vitet, with all his historical insight, lacked both poetic passion and the artistic gift of organisation. Because he is never capable of developing pathos, of rising to a climax, from the height of which all the rest would be felt to be preparation and result, he never attains to really artistic construction. He was evidently haunted by a species of artistic anxiety, a fear of making the slightest alteration in the historical facts, a fear of obtruding his own personality. He had not a strong enough individuality to dare to issue an artistic coinage stamped with his own image. His productivity ceased as early as it did, because the imagination which inspired his works, though vigorous, was not free, not independent, either in its observation or in its reproduction; it was hampered and weighted by scholarship, by the dust of the record office. This beautiful and fiery Pegasus stood tethered in a library.