If it is impossible to do justice to Mérimée's purely literary work in a short introduction, it is evident that it is out of the question even to touch upon his historical work, or on his numerous reports as Inspector General of Public Monuments, or on the great number of his prefaces and articles on history, archaeology, art, architecture, ceramics, travel and literature. Neither can anything but a bare mention be made of his large correspondence, which has been so important a factor in a truer study of Mérimée. One matter should, however, be brought out here. Though he fails to appreciate Russian mystic feeling and melancholy, though he enters only into those elements of Russian literature which are like himself and appeal to him, he deserves credit for having been practically the first to introduce that literature to France. The immediate results of Mérimée's studies in Russian are articles on Nicolas Gogol (1852), on Alexander Pushkin (1868) and on Ivan Turgenieff (1868), the last of which is a preface to a translation by one Augustin Galitzin of that author's "Fumée" of which Mérimée had, besides, corrected the proof-sheets. Further translations were: "La Dame de pique", "Les Bohémiens", "Le Hussard" (1852), and "Le Coup de pistolet" (1856), from Pushkin; "L'Inspecteur général" (1853) from Gogol's "Revisor". It goes without saying that translations by an artist of Mérimée's caliber have from the stylistic point of view the value of original stories. Mérimée has taken his place in the history of French literature as discreetly as if he were alive. Nobody has attacked him, nobody has lauded him to the skies. But his fame is genuine and still growing. A classicist from personal taste, he becomes one of the first realists by way of reaction from romantic exaggeration. Above all he is an artist. He excels in planning the just proportion of the parts of a story. He rebels at the non-essential. And he conceals the machinery of narration so successfully that it escapes detection, thereby giving the impression of spontaneity, which is the _sine qua non_ of any art. He is the foremost novelettist of his time. Sorrow over the Franco-Prussian war hastened his end. His death, which, in 1869, had been erroneously announced in all the newspapers of Europe, passed unnoticed amid the loud crash of the downfall of the second empire. MATEO FALCONE