dead come back, I cannot say. Certainly that old ballad literature
has instances in plenty, in which the voice, the hand, the brief
visit from the grave, is a natural response to the cry of the human
creature. That ghosts should return, as they do so often in
Merimee's fiction, is but a sort of natural justice. Only, in
Merimee's prose ballads, in those admirable, short, ballad-like
stories, where every word tells, of which he was a master, almost the
inventor, they are a kind of half-material ghosts--a vampire tribe--
and never come to do people good; congruously with the mental
constitution of the writer, which, alike in fact and fiction, [31]
could hardly have horror enough--theme after theme. Merimee himself
emphasises this almost constant motive of his fiction when he adds to
one of his volumes of short stories some letters on a matter of fact-
-a Spanish bull-fight, in which those old Romans, he regretted, might
seem, decadently, to have survived. It is as if you saw it. In
truth, Merimee was the unconscious parent of much we may think of
dubious significance in later French literature. It is as if there
were nothing to tell of in this world but various forms of hatred,
and a love that is like lunacy; and the only other world, a world of
maliciously active, hideous, dead bodies.

Merimee, a literary artist, was not a man who used two words where
one would do better, and he shines especially in those brief
compositions which, like a minute intaglio, reveal at a glance his
wonderful faculty of design and proportion in the treatment of his
work, in which there is not a touch but counts. That is an art of
which there are few examples in English; our somewhat diffuse, or
slipshod, literary language hardly lending itself to the
concentration of thought and expression, which are of the essence of
such writing. It is otherwise in French, and if you wish to know