Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world, not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist, writing at a time when realism was most potent in France. The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer visited the island in 1872. The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight in his autobiographic _Le Roman d’un enfant_ not only inbreathed his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery--as his Cross of the Legion of Honor testifies--in the Tonquin campaign, when France must needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia. M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by year. In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and Scribe. Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard, tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like muscles to spectacular account! So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the task gave pause even to Loti himself.