An ardent admirer of the author of the stories in _The Odd Number_ has protested to me that M. Coppee is not an etcher like M. de Maupassant, but rather a painter in water-colors. And why not? Thus might we call M. Alphonse Daudet an artist in pastels, so adroitly does he suggest the very bloom of color. No doubt M. Coppee's _contes_ have not the sharpness of M. de Maupassant's, nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet's--but what of it? They have qualities of their own; they have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either M. de Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppee's street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadows of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful. They are intensely to be enjoyed by those of us who take the same keen delight in the varied phases of life in New York. They are not, to my mind, really rivalled either by those of M. de Maupassant, who is a Norman by birth and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity and in their verity. It may be fancy, but I seem to see also a finer morality in M. Coppee's work than in M. de Maupassant's or in M. Daudet's or in that of almost any other of the Parisian story-tellers of to-day. In his tales we breathe a purer moral atmosphere, more wholesome and more bracing. It is not that M. Coppee probably thinks of ethics rather than aesthetics; in this respect his attitude is undoubtedly that of the others; there is no sermon in his song--or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Moliere, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which always punishes the villain in the fifth act.