pleasantness, in spite of its gloomy theme, into Merimee's one quite cheerful book. Cheerful, because, after all, the gloomy passions it presents are but the accidents of a particular age, and not like the mental conditions in which Merimee was most apt to look for the spectacle of human power, allied to madness or disease in the individual. For him, at least, it was the office of fiction to carry one into a different if not a better world than that actually around us; and if the Chronicle of Charles the Ninth provided an escape from the tame circumstances of contemporary life into an impassioned past, Colomba is a measure of the resources for mental alteration which may be found even in the modern age. There was a corner of [23] the French Empire, in the manners of which assassination still had a large part. "The beauty of Corsica," says Merimee, "is grave and sad. The aspect of the capital does but augment the impression caused by the solitude that surrounds it. There is no movement in the streets. You hear there none of the laughter, the singing, the loud talking, common in the towns of Italy. Sometimes, under the shadow of a tree on the promenade, a dozen armed peasants will be playing cards, or looking on at the game. The Corsican is naturally silent. Those who walk the pavement are all strangers: the islanders stand at their doors: every one seems to be on the watch, like a falcon on its nest. All around the gulf there is but an expanse of tanglework; beyond it, bleached mountains. Not a habitation! Only, here and there, on the heights about the town, certain white constructions detach themselves from the background of green. They are funeral chapels or family tombs." Crude in colour, sombre, taciturn, Corsica, as Merimee here describes it, is like the national passion of the Corsican--that morbid personal pride, usurping the place even of grief for the dead, which centuries of traditional violence had concentrated into an all-absorbing passion for bloodshed, for bloody revenges, in collusion with the natural wildness, and the wild social condition of the island still unaffected even by the finer [24] ethics of the duel. The supremacy of that passion is well indicated by the cry, put into the mouth of a young man in the presence of the corpse of his father deceased in the course of nature--a young man meant to be commonplace. "Ah! Would thou hadst died malamorte--by violence! We might have avenged thee!"