power with our present generation. But romance itself is imperishable, and will be so long as the unknowable still sets its threshold of gloom and mystery beyond all formulated natural causes. I don't want to accuse myself of desiring that people should read 'Douglas Duane' in any light but the experimental and precarious one of fantasy; but to read it by the 'red fire' of Gautier's adroit little trifle is wholly a different process."
Leaving aside the question of plagiarism with a consciousness that Mr. Fawcett has got the best of the argument, the student of comparative literature and folk-lore may find much to interest him in tracing the genesis of the idea that has branched out into "Avatar" on the one hand and "Douglas Duane" on the other. That idea is simply the transference of a soul to an alien body. How Mr. Fawcett has treated it is familiar to the reader of Lippincott's. Gautier is ingenious, fantastic, humorous. The souls of Count Labinski and Octave de Saville—one the husband, the other the hopeless lover, of the heroine—are made to exchange bodies through the magic arts of Dr. Cherbonneau, invoked by the lover. The lover, of course, is conscious of the change, the husband at first is not. Ingenious complications ensue, the climax of absurdity being reached when the two men fight a duel, each knowing that if he kills the other he kills his own body. But the transformed Octave is in despair at finding that the countess, warned by feminine intuition, has closed her door upon him: he confesses all to Labinski, the duel is dropped, and they repair to Cherbonneau for restoration to their original selves. The wily old doctor causes Labinski's soul to migrate back to the proper body, but transfers his own soul into the youthful body of Octave, first taking the precaution of making the latter Dr. Cherbonneau's legatee. Mr. Fawcett's accusers have discovered a number of stories which turn on this same idea of metempsychosis,—one, "A Life Magnet," by Alvey A. Adee, published in Putnam's Magazine in 1870; another, a German novelette, called "Wer?" by the Baroness Ida von Duringsfeld. They might have amplified the list by adding Julian Hawthorne's "Professor Weisheit's Experiment," in Lippincott's Magazine for May, 1886, and especially a once famous story, "The Metempsychosis," contributed by Robert McNish to Blackwood's Magazine about the same time that "Avatar" appeared in France, and resembling the latter story not only in the double transmigration of souls, but also in the amusing effects gained from a personal encounter between the transformed. The comparative mythologist will find no difficulty in relegating all these stories to the cycle of which "King Robert of Sicily," the monkish legend which Longfellow has versified, and "Abou Hassan, or the Sleeper Awakened," of the Arabian Nights, are the best-known examples.
"Mr. Incoul's Misadventure" (Benjamin & Bell), the first essay in fiction of Mr. Edgar Saltus, is the sort of novel which you might expect from the clever expounder of the "Philosophy of Disenchantment," the biographer of Balzac, the admirer of Schopenhauer and of Mérimée. This ghastly study of the quiet, sedate, easy-going, yet vindictive and relentless man of middle age who has taken to himself a young wife on her positive stipulation that the marriage shall be one in name only; who cherishes the hope of winning her over until he finds out that she has a lover, and suspects that the lover has dishonored him; who makes no outward sign, however, until the time arrives when he is enabled to trump up an accusation of cheating at cards which drives the lover to
