sur Paris” themselves, which, as first completed in 1854, the year of this publication, had been perfectly normal. Another of the etched poems, “_L’Espérance_,” accompanies _Le Pont-au-Change_. After this, two more of the “Eaux-Fortes” remain to be noticed, and they are by general agreement the finest of the whole set: _La Morgue_ and _L’Abside de Notre-Dame de Paris_, both etched in 1854. _La Morgue_ (plate 20) combines a masterly distribution of black and white spaces and a perfectly successful treatment of the windows, roofs and chimneys, which rise in a curious succession of different levels from the riverside, with a motive of poignant human interest in the dramatic group that bears, on the left, the body of a drowned man from the Seine towards the “Doric little Morgue,” as Browning calls it, on the right. The associations of the building, irresistibly suggested by this incident, are explained in the pathetic little poem, “_L’Hôtellerie de la Mort_” (plate 21), Meryon’s finest effort in verse, etched on two separate plates and intended to accompany _La Morgue_, but so rare that it very seldom does so. “The bed and the table that the City of Paris offers gratis at any time to its poor children,” we can imagine what they are--a marble slab, with water dripping down it, under that roof so magnificently etched. “Puissiez-vous ne point voir Là sur le marbre noir De quelqu’âme chérie La navrante effigie!” The poem was evidently completed originally in the first column, ending with Meryon’s name, address and date, to which he added as an afterthought a second column of verses full of consoling thoughts and ending with words of faith and hope about the expansion of a flower “à la fraiche corolle, à la sainte auréole,” a flower of love and happiness, from the germ that is in man’s heart. In the impression at the British Museum, words of bad omen, like “Mort,” “Misère,” “Plaisir,” are printed in red, and the good words, “Dieu,” “Cieux,” “Amour,” and “Bonheur,” are printed in blue. Then follows _L’Abside_ (plate 22), the justly famous masterpiece for which higher sums are paid to-day than for any other etching except some of Rembrandt’s. The design of the whole plate, the lighting of the sky and of the side of the majestic cathedral, the proportion of the towers and high-pitched roof of Notre-Dame to the massive but comparatively insignificant buildings along the line of the Seine combine to produce a total effect of unrivalled dignity and charm. How eloquent, too, is the contrast of all that splendid architecture across the river with the squalid foreground, where heaps of sand are being shovelled into carts, and barges of the humblest kind are moored along the shore. _L’Abside_, again, has a little etched poem “O toi dégustateur de tout morceau gothique,” to accompany it, but this is one of the very rarest of Meryon’s etchings and is not in the British Museum, though the verses are written in