During his stay in Italy he had written nothing; but the five years which followed his return are those of his most active and brilliant productivity. The finest of his verses, the most charming of his tales, the most original of his comedies, belong to this relatively busy period. Everything that he wrote at this time has a depth and intensity which distinguishes it from the jocosely sentimental productions of his debut, and from the somewhat mannered and vapidly elegant compositions which he put forth, at wide intervals, during the last fifteen years of his life. This was the period of Musset's intellectual virility. He was very precocious, but he was at the same time, at first, very youthful. On the other hand, his decline began early; in most of his later things, especially in his verses (they become very few in number), the inspiration visibly runs thin. "Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre," he had said, and both clauses of the sentence are true. His glass held but a small quantity; the best of his verses--those that one knows by heart and never wearies of repeating--are very soon counted. We have named them when we have mentioned "Rolla," the "Nuit de Mai," the "Nuit d'Aout" and the "Nuit d'Octobre"; the "Lettre a Lamartine," and the "Stances a la Malibran." These, however, are perfection; and if Musset had written nothing else, he would have had a right to say that it was from his own glass that he drank. The most beautiful of his comedies, "Il ne faut pas badiner avec l'Amour," dates from 1834, and to the same year belongs the "Lorenzaccio," the strongest, if not the most exquisite, of his dramatic attempts. His two most agreeable _nouvelles_, "Emmeline" and "Frederic et Bernerette," appeared about the same time. But we have not space to enumerate his productions in detail. During the fifteen last years of his life, as we have said, they grew more and more rare; the poet had, in a certain sense, out-lived himself. Of these last years Herr Lindau gives a rather realistic and unflattered sketch; picturing him especially as a figure publicly familiar to Parisian loungers, who were used to observe him as "an unfortunate with an interesting face, dressed with extreme care," with the look of youth and the lassitude of age, seated in a corner of a cafe and gazing blankly over a marble table on which "a half empty bottle of absinthe and a quite empty glass" stood before him. M. Paul de Musset, in describing his brother's later years, is mindful of the rule to glide, not to press; with a very proper fraternal piety, he leaves a great many foibles and transgressions in the shade. He mentions, however, Alfred's partiality for spirits and stimulants--a taste which had defined itself in his early years. Musset made an excessive use of liquor; in plain English, he got drunk. Sainte-Beuve, somewhere in one of his merciless but valuable foot-notes, alludes to the author of "Rolla" coming tipsy to the sittings of the French Academy.