ambridge University.

Alfred de Musset belongs to the class of poets whose inner history excites
most curiosity, because his readers feel that there lies the spring of his
power, the secret of his charm, as well as the key to the riddles and
inconsistencies which his writings present: they are so imbued with the
essence of a common humanity that the heart that beats, the tears which
start, the blood which courses through them, keep time with our own. The
desire to penetrate still further into the intimacy to which they admit us
is quite distinct from the vulgar inquisitiveness which pursues celebrity,
or merely notoriety, into privacy. His biography has lately been published
by one who recognizes the true nature of this curiosity: Paul de Musset has
reserved the right of telling his brother's story, regarding it, he says,
"not only as a duty I owe to the man I loved best, and whose most intimate
and confidential friend I was, but as a necessary complement to the perfect
understanding of his works, for his work was himself."

The way in which this task has been performed is not entirely satisfactory,
and many passionate admirers of the poet, the order of readers to whom it
is dedicated, will feel disappointment and a regretful sense of its failing
to fulfil what it undertook, increased by the conviction that, having been
undertaken by the hand best fitted for it by natural propriety, it cannot
be done again. The book bears the relation to what one desired and expected
that a bare diary does to the journal, or memoranda to the lecture. It is a
collection of notes on the life of Alfred de Musset, rather than a full
memoir. This inadequacy arises principally from the biographer himself.
Paul de Musset, the poet's elder and only brother, is a man of taste and
cultivation, a judge of art, literature, music and the drama, a person of
charming manners and conversation, dignified, kindly, courteous, easy: he
was until middle age a busy, working man, whose leisure moments were
occupied with writings that have found little favor, except the _Femmes de
la Regence_ and the pretty child's story of _M. le Vent et Mme. la Pluie_,
which latter has been translated. He was the devoted, unselfish friend and
mentor of Alfred, to whose juniority and genius he extended an indulgence
of which he needed no share for himself: in fact, he was the elder brother
of the Prodigal in everything but want of generosity. A more amiable
portrait cannot be