wn carriage, or at least in a hired cab, summoned from
the nearest stand. M. Paul de Musset is a devoted brother and an
agreeable writer; but he is not, from the critic's point of view, the
ideal biographer. This, however, is not seriously to be regretted, for
it is little to be desired that the ideal biography of Alfred de Musset
should be written, or that he should be delivered over, bound hand and
foot, to the critics. Those who really care for him would prefer to
judge him with all kinds of allowances and indulgences--sentimentally
and imaginatively. Between him and his readers it is a matter of
affection, or it is nothing at all; and there is something very happy,
therefore, in M. Paul de Musset's fond, fraternal reticency and
extenuation. He has related his brother's life as if it were a pretty
"story"; and indeed there is enough that was pretty in it to justify
him. We should decline to profit by any information that might be
offered us in regard to its prosaic, its possibly shabby side. To make
the story complete, however, there appears simultaneously with M. Paul
de Musset's volume a publication of a quite different sort--a memoir of
the poet by a clever German writer, Herr Paul Lindau.[2] Herr Lindau is
highly appreciative, but he is also critical, and he says a great many
things which M. Paul de Musset leaves unsaid. As becomes a German
biographer, he is very minute and exhaustive, and a stranger who should
desire a "general idea" of the poet would probably get more instruction
from his pages than from the French memoir. Their fault is indeed that
they are apparently addressed to persons whose mind is supposed to be a
blank with regard to the author of "Rolla." The exactions of bookmaking
alone can explain the long analyses and prose paraphrases of Alfred de
Musset's comedies and tales to which Herr Lindau treats his readers--the
dreariest kind of reading when an author is not in himself essentially
inaccessible. Either one has not read Alfred de Musset's comedies or
not felt the charm of them--in which case one will not be likely to
resort to Herr Lindau's memoirs--or one _has_ read them, in the
charming original, and can therefore dispense with an elaborate German
_resume_.

[1] "_Biographie de Alfred de Musset: sa Vie et ses Oeuvres._"
Par PAUL DE MUSSET. Paris: Charpentier.

[2] "_Alfred de Musset._" Von PAUL LINDAU. Berlin: Hofmann.

In saying just now that M. Paul de Musset's biograp