Just the beauty and the interest of the case are, however, that such a condition by no means exhausts our opportunity, since in no like connection could it be less said that to know most is most easily or most complacently to conclude. May we not decidedly feel the sense and the “lesson,” the suggestive spread, of a career as a thing scarce really to be measured when the effect of more and more acquaintance with it is simply to make the bounds of appreciation recede? This is why the figure now shown us, blazed upon to the last intensity by the lamplight of investigation, and with the rank oil consumed in the process fairly filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour of that contemplation which yet involves discomfiture for us so long as certain lucidities on our own part, certain serenities of assurance, fail correspondingly to play up. We feel ourselves so outfaced, as it were; we somehow want in any such case to meet and match the assurances with which the subject himself or herself immitigably bristles, and are nevertheless by no means certain that our bringing up premature forces or trying to reply with lights of our own may not check the current of communication, practically without sense for us unless flowing at its fullest. At our biographer’s rate of progress we shall still have much to wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that we have not plenty to go on with. To this may be added that the stretch of “life,” apart from the more concrete exhibition, already accounted for by our three volumes (if one may discriminate between “production” and life to a degree that is in this connection exceptionally questionable), represents to all appearance the most violently and variously agitated face of the career. The establishment of the Second Empire ushered in for Madame Sand, we seem in course of preparation to make out, the long period already more or less known to fame, that is to criticism, as the period of her great placidity, her more or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon hours as hazily golden as so many reigns of Antonines, when her genius had mastered the high art of acting without waste, when a happy play of inspiration had all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of filling her large capacity and her beautiful form to the brim, and when the gathered fruit of what she had dauntlessly done and been heaped itself upon her table as a rich feast for memory and philosophy. So she came in for the enjoyment of all the _sagesse_ her contemporaries (with only such exceptions as M. Paul de Musset and Madame Louise Colet and the few discordant pleaders for poor Chopin) finally rejoiced on their side to acclaim; the sum of her aspects “composing,” arranging themselves in relation to each other, with a felicity that nothing could exceed and that swept with great glosses and justifications every aspect of the past. To few has it been given to “pay” so little, according to