It would appear to be taking a liberty with the reader—or, indeed, what is far worse, to savour somewhat of bookmaking—to engraft a biography on a biography. We have already promised to give some account of the relations between Panizzi and Prosper Mérimée, the well-known writer and French statesman, which account would be incomplete were we to omit some special mention of Mérimée himself. It may be asserted, moreover, that Mérimée deserves, on his own intrinsic merit, a place in the memoir of Panizzi. Happily it has been our pleasing task of late to edit the whole of the letters which passed between them during their long friendship, and as nothing affords a better insight into the true character of a man than his familiar epistles to his friends, we shall make so bold as to use these letters as freely as may appear desirable in this short notice of the writer of them. It is much to be regretted that Panizzi’s letters to Mérimée have all been destroyed, with the exception of the very few already quoted, copies of which have been found amongst his papers. In the time of the unhappy Commune, on the 23rd of May, 1871, amongst other and more important buildings, Mérimée’s house was burnt down, and with it much which would have been most valuable for our present purpose. _What has distressed me most_, wrote a friend to Panizzi on this calamity, _was to see the place where poor Mérimée’s house had been! It is a total wreck! All his furniture, his fine library, his manuscripts, his letters, and the thousand souvenirs of a long and intellectual lifetime all reduced to ashes._ In conversation one day, Mons. Du Sommerard, of the Hotel Cluny, whose name is frequently mentioned in Mérimée’s letters, informed the present writer how he went to the spot shortly after the fire, in the hope of saving a few little things as souvenirs. But, alas! nothing was left as a relic of Prosper Mérimée except an old pipe. Happy indeed had he only succeeded in rescuing a picture of Mérimée at five years old, painted by his mother, and another by Alexander Colin, painted about 1865. The biographer knew the house well, Number 52, Rue de Lille (Paris), and remembers the room hung round with pictures of the Spanish School and English line-engravings. In September, 1869, he stayed with Mérimée. May his vanity in inserting the following record of that visit be pardoned by the reader! “Paris, 15th September, 1869. “Mon cher Sir Anthony, _alias_ Pan, “J’ai eu la visite de Fagan, qui a diné avec moi Dimanche. Il m’a paru grandi et développé de toutes les manières, toujours très bon garçon, conservant malgré toutes les nationalités par où il a passé l’air de _l’English boy_.”