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touches. His real imaginative power is shown in his masterly evocation of localities, and in the thick-coming fancies that minister to his inexhaustible conception of that pictorial "setting" of human life which interested him so much more than human life itself. In the "Capitaine Fracasse," the "Roman de la Momie," "Le Roi Candaule," "Une Nuit de Cléopâtre," and "Aria Marcella" he revels in his passion for scenic properties and backgrounds. His science, in so far as it is archæological, is occasionally at fault, we suspect, and his facts slightly fantastic; but it all sounds very fine and his admirable pictorial instinct makes everything pass. He reconstructs the fabulous splendours of old Egypt with a magnificent audacity of detail, and rivals John Martin, of mezzotinto fame, in the energy with which he depicts the light of torches washing the black basalt of palace stairs. If the portrait is here and there inaccurate, so much the worse for the original. The works we have just mentioned proceed altogether by pictures. No reader of the "Roman de la Momie" will have forgotten the portentous image of the great Pharaoh, who sits like a soulless idol upon his palace roof and watches his messengers swim across the Nile and come and lie on their faces (some of them dying) at his feet. Such a picture as the following, from "Une Nuit