His _Inès de Las Sierras_ is a ghost-story the beauty of which renders it infinitely superior to the ordinary ghost-story. The horror produced by the unaccountable apparition is blent with the admiration aroused by the supernatural visitant's gentle grace; these feelings do not neutralise each other, but act in combination with a peculiar power; and it is this combination which is the secret of Nodier's effects. It is a pity that he has spoiled the beautiful story by a trivial and improbable conclusion, which explains away the ghost in the most commonplace manner. The apparition seen in the old castle at midnight is not the ghost of the young dancing-girl, murdered 300 years before, but a living Spanish maiden who happens to bear the same name, and whom a fantastic and incredible concatenation of circumstances has led to dance there, dressed in white. There is genuine Latin rationality in this solution of the mystery, but it is offered to us, as it were, ironically. A story like _Inès de Las Sierras_, however, is what most exactly demonstrates the poetic progress made since the eighteenth century, which was such an enemy of the supernatural, even in fiction, that Voltaire regarded himself as an audacious reformer when (in his _Semiramis_) he allowed the ridiculous ghost of Minus to howl some alexandrines through a speaking-trumpet in broad daylight. _La Fée aux Miettes_ seems to me the best of Nodier's fantastic tales. There is undoubtedly too much of it; it is not without an effort that one follows all the wild twists and turnings of a fantasy which occupies 120 quarto pages, even though much of it is both interesting and charming. A poor, harmless lunatic in the asylum of Glasgow tells the story of his life. This is the setting of the tale, but we forget it altogether in the marvellousness of the events related. All the chords of human life are touched, jarringly and wildly. It is as if life itself passed before one's eyes seen wrong side out, seen from the perfectly permissible standpoint of the dreamer or the delirious fever-patient.