and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human nature and human feeling in such drolleries as the _Chapeau de Paille_ and _le Plus Heureux des Trois_ than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard (say) and Hugo put together. Labiche. Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to play its maddest pranks at will. _Moi_ is an admirable comedy, and De la Porcheraie is almost hideously egoistic; the _Voyage de M. Perrichon_ is delightful reading, and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the _Chapeau de Paille_, the _Cagnotte_, the _Trente Millions_, the _Sensitive_, the _Deux Merles Blancs_, the _Doit-On le Dire_, and their compeers--with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody, everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy- turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly, where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your Chimaera has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of the great globe of Moliere--that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius for its scientific men, and Lelie and Agnes for its incarnations of love and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired to the Academy's spare arm-chair--that one above all others but just vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy--was a fact that roused the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugene Labiche, for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years--for almost as long, that is, as the _Revue_ had been sending it to sleep. There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification than whole folios of good counsel. 'I regarded him not,' quoth Sir John of one that would have moved him to sapience, 'and yet he talked wisely.' Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the _Revue_, would never have said all that--the second part of it he might--of anything signed 'Eugene Labiche,' nor--so I love to believe--would his august creator either. For