eir plots, but in what, for want of a better term,
one may call their sentimental perfume. The earliest of them failed
upon the stage, and for many years it was supposed they could not be
played. Musset supposed so himself, and took no trouble to encourage
the experiment. He made no concessions to contemporary "realism." But
at last they were taken up--almost by accident--and it was found that,
in the hands of actors whose education enabled them to appreciate their
delicacy, this delicacy might become wonderfully effective. If feeling
is the great quality in his verses, the case is the same in his
strange, fantastic, exquisite little _comedies_; comedies in the
literal English sense of the word we can hardly call them, for they
have almost always a melancholy or a tragical termination. They are
thoroughly sentimental; he puts before us people who convince us that
they really _feel_; the drama is simply the history of their feeling.
In the emotions of Valentin and Perdican, of Fantasio and Fortunio, of
Celio and Octave, of Carmosine and Bettine, there is something
contagious, irresistibly touching. But the great charm is Musset's
dramatic world itself, the atmosphere in which his figures move, the
element they breathe.

It seems at first like a reckless thing to say, but we will risk it: in
the _quality_ of his fancy Musset always reminds us of Shakespeare. His
little dramas go on in the country of "As you Like It" and the
"Winter's Tale"; the author is at home there, like Shakespeare himself,
and he moves with something of the Shakespearian lightness and freedom.
His fancy loves to play with human life, and in the tiny mirror which
it holds up we find something of the depth and mystery of the object.
Musset's dialogue, in its mingled gayety and melancholy, its sweetness
and irony, its allusions to real things and its kinship with a romantic
world, has an altogether indefinable magic. To speak it on the stage is
almost to make it coarse. Once Musset attempted a larger theme than
usual; in "Lorenzaccio" he wrote an historical drama on the scale of
Shakespeare's histories; that is, with multitudes of figures, scenes,
incidents, and illustrations. He laid his hand on an admirable
subject--the story of a certain Lorenzino de' Medici, who played at
being a debauchee and a poltroon in order better to put the tyrant of
Florence (his own cousin) off his guard, and serve his country by
ridding her of him. The play shows an extrao