expression of George Sand's--could never suffice. They dreamed of an art of painting which should find its expression in blood, purple, light, movement, and boldness; they held in sovereign contempt the correct, pedantic, colourless tendency of their elders. An inner flame should glow through and liberate the forms, absorb the lines and contours, and mould the picture into a symphony of colour. What was desired and sought for, in poetry and in music, in plastic art and in painting, was colour and passion: colour so energetic, that drawing was, as it were, consumed by it; passion so vehement, that lyrical poetry and the drama were in danger of becoming feverish and convulsive. A movement which reminds one of the Renaissance took possession of all minds. It was as though there were something intoxicating in the very air that one breathed. On a political background of grey upon grey, consisting of the cowls of the Jesuits of the Restoration, there arose a flaming, refulgent, blustering literature and art, scintillating with sparks and bright hues, full of the adoration of passion and of fervid colour. Romanticism is Protestantism in literature and art--such is Vitet's definition of the movement. Literature, which, adapting itself to the politics of the government, had begun in Chateaubriand with an enthusiastic fervour for Catholicism, Monarchy, and Mediævalism, had in the twenties become revolutionary; and the description of its battles is one of the most glowing chapters in George Brandes' classic work. There was a revolt against the pseudo-antique, against the stiff handling of the Alexandrine metre, against the yoke of tradition. Then arose that mighty race of Romantic poets who proclaimed with Byronic fire the gospel of nature and passion. De Musset, the famous child of the century, the idol of the young generation, the poet with the burning heart, who rushed through life with such eagerness and haste that at the age of forty he broke down altogether, worn out like a man of seventy, deliberately wrote bad rhymes in his first poems, for the purpose of thoroughly infuriating the Classicists. So, too, he wrote his dramas, in which love is glorified as a serious and terrible power with which one may not trifle, as the fire with which one must not play, as the electric spark that kills. So George Sand, the female Titan of Romanticism, published her novels, with their subversive tendencies and their sparkling animation of narrative. Between these two rises the keen bronze-like profile of Prosper Mérimée, who prefers to describe the life of gypsies and robbers, and to depict the most violent and desperate characters in history. Finally, Victor Hugo, the great chieftain of the Romantic school, the Paganini of literature, unrivalled in imposing grandeur, in masterly treatment of language, and in petty vanity, found submissive multitudes to listen to him when he rose in fierce and fiery insurrection against the rigid laws