There is, to be sure, a "story": in fact, around this sprightly figure De Coster has woven--contemporaneously, it is bewildering to reflect, with the weaving of a dreary mystery about one Edwin Drood,--an intricate romance as cruel as life and considerably gayer. Somewhat to deviate metaphorically, De Coster, in this tale of fifteenth-century Flemings in course of being enlightened and uplifted by the auto-da-fés and hangmen of the Holy Inquisition, has builded a story which is not unsuggestive of a time-mellowed fifteenth-century cathedral; with the gentry about their devotions, and with peasants joking on the porches, and with a stately hymn music accompanying both the aspiration and the guffaws; a cathedral, too, that is no less opulent in glowing paintings of rapt saints and archangels than in captivatingly hideous gargoyles.... Here again, one is tempted to expatiate, concerning these gargoyles: and I would like here to talk about the superlunar bleak buffooneries of the chapter which depicts the death of Charles the Fifth, and his trial in heaven; or to applaud the account of Tyl's hunting of the werwolf; or, at least, to note that really intolerable "catharsis by pity and terror" when Katheline the good witch attempts to share her cup of cold water with Joos Damman in the torture chamber.... § 27 But what, above all, remains with us is the figure of the tall young rogue who passes hardly any alcove which hide-bound morality has labelled "Keep Out" without a little dalliance therein. Ahead is a closed door, lightly ajar, a black door with silver-plated handles, which one perforce approaches always: in the meantime it is astonishing to note what a number of pleasant and blameworthy things one can discover to do. Reflection finds the circumstance unfortunate that most of the agreeable actions of life are either forbidden or else deplorably behedged with restrictions. From drunkenness and from the effects of certain drugs can be obtained moments, and even hours, of conscious contentment: probably in no other way, indeed, is it possible for human beings to induce an unbroken twenty minutes of actual and complete happiness: but with repetition such pleasures increasingly work the deuce of a damage to one's health and purse. Besides, our inefficient bodies prove unable to stay comfortably inebriate, for more than a brief while, without drifting into sleep or collapsing in sickness: and our equally inefficient medicine men have found out no amiable method of, in the time-honored phrase, recuperating from alcoholic excesses.