at every successive reading this disappears. The enormous genius which can thus reconstruct—or invent, if you will—a world so different from the world we know, yet coherent, consistent, possible even, and tallying well with the few known facts of the matter; the absolutely unsurpassed excellence of the descriptions, which have the matter-of-fact exactitude that Macaulay was pleased to laugh at in Dante; the power and art of the thing, in short, grow on one strangely. To read Salammbô has an effect something like the described effect of haschisch or opium without the unpleasant after-results; and it may be added that each successive exhibition of the drug is more potent and less deleterious than the earlier experiences, a characteristic not common in artificial paradises. We grow accustomed to the grisly goregeous world in which we find ourselves, the painting of God’s judgments in purple and crimson becomes as natural as it was in a certain Hollow City, and the cruelty and the vigour, the hideous diseases and the terrible workship of the Semite, cease to affect us other than dramatically. If Salammbô is colourless, we remember that Jephtha’s daughter owes most of her colour to the “Dream of Fair Women.” If Hamilcar is treacherous and cruel, it occurs to us that some casuistry has been expended on the performances of Jacob and David. If Hanno is a leper, what was Naaman? But for all this I do not know that Salammbô is to be recommended for general reading. It is altogether an esoteric book requiring initiation, training, preliminary ceremonies and efforts. Now the novel-reader, not unjustly, is little inclined to comply with such a demand. He prefers that his books should please him at the first reading, not at the second, third, or tenth.

Another long interval—seven years—passed, and Flaubert once more presented himself. This time his burden was again of an entirely different nature. Salammbô is hardly more different from Madame Bovary than L’Éducation Sentimentale is from both. There are here no horrors, no splendours, no unfamiliar scenery, no hazardous description. I have already suggested an alternative title for the book, and of such alternatives very moderate ingenuity might supply half a dozen. It is an encyclopædic sort of novel, and goes some way towards being a whole Comédie Humanie of failure in two volumes. But Flaubert’s critics were equal to the occasion. M. de Pontmartin had informed him that Salammbô might be Carthaginian, but was not human. M. Saint-René Taillandier now informed him that Frederic Moreau might be human, but was unreadably dull. Dullness, indeed, is a favourite charge against L’éducation Sentimentale, and one criticism I have read of it pronounces it full of all sorts of admirable things, but “dead,” “sawdust and ashes.” Let us see what it is really like.

We are introduced to the hero on board a Seine steamboat which is taking him home at the end of his college days— college rather in the French and older Scotch, than in the English sense. He meets on board the boat an affable gentleman, one M. Jacques Arnoux, with whose wife Frederic Moreau instantly falls in love, as in 1840 a young gentleman of eighteen years old was bound to do, considering that the lady had black hair and an olive skin, and was therefore strictly comme il faut in the romantic sense. Before he leaves the boat, the affable Arnoux invites him to go and see them in Paris, whither he is soon to return to study law, and he reaches his mother’s house convinced of a great passion. As soon as he returns to the capital he makes his call, uselessly at first, but afterwards with better success. Arnoux is the editor of an art journal, and his office is the regular lounging place of a large floating circle of artists, men of letters, amateur politicians, and the like, with most of whom Frederic soon makes acquaintance. He is also, after some little time, made free of the drawing-room as well as the office, and finds Madame Arnoux as charming as he had thought her, but altogether free from coquetry, indeed a model wife and mother, while he himself is much too young and too diffident to lay violent siege to her. His acquaintance, moreover, is not confined to this clique. He makes friends up to a certain point with many of his fellow- students. He has introductions to a M. Dambreuse, a provincial seigneur who has amalgamated his de and taken to financing. After a time, too, his school crony, Deslauriers, comes up to Paris and keeps house with him.

But he does not take kindly to the study of the law, and he does not find that his friends and the amusements of Paris give him much pleasure. He discovers, while at home on a visit, that he is much poorer than he thought, and this makes a very disagreeable change in his ideas, the only consolation he has being the small auburn-haired daughter of a rich country neighbour, to whom he reads much romantic literature, and who is immensely fond of him. Suddenly an old uncle dies and leaves him twelve hundred a year. He of course returns to Paris, expecting to lead a perfectly happy life. He renews his old friendships