ly egoistic; the _Voyage de M. Perrichon_ is
delightful reading, and Perrichon is as pompous an ass as I know; but the
_Chapeau de Paille_, the _Cagnotte_, the _Trente Millions_, the
_Sensitive_, the _Deux Merles Blancs_, the _Doit-On le Dire_, and their
compeers--with them it is other-guess work altogether. In these
whimsical phantasmagorias men and women move and speak as at the bidding
of destinies drunk with laughing-gas. Time and chance have gone
demented, fate has turned comic poet, society has become its own parody,
everybody is the irrepressible caricature of himself. You are in a topsy-
turvy world, enveloped in an atmosphere instinct with gaiety and folly,
where burlesque is natural and only the extravagant is normal; where your
Chimaera has grown frolic, your Nightmare is first Cousin to the Cheshire
Cat, and your Sphinxes are all upon the spree; and where you have as
little concern for what is real as you have in that hemisphere of the
great globe of Moliere--that has Scapin and Sganarelle for its
breed-bates, and Pourceaugnac for its butt, and Pancrace and Marphurius
for its scientific men, and Lelie and Agnes for its incarnations of love
and beauty. That the creator of such a world as this should have aspired
to the Academy's spare arm-chair--that one above all others but just
vacated by the respectable M. de Sacy--was a fact that roused the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_ even to satire. But if the arm-chair brought honour
with it, then no man better deserved the privilege than Eugene Labiche,
for he had amused and kept awake the public for nearly forty years--for
almost as long, that is, as the _Revue_ had been sending it to sleep.
There are times and seasons when a good laugh makes more for edification
than whole folios of good counsel. 'I regarded him not,' quoth Sir John
of one that would have moved him to sapience, 'and yet he talked wisely.'
Now Sir John, whatever his opinion of the _Revue_, would never have said
all that--the second part of it he might--of anything signed 'Eugene
Labiche,' nor--so I love to believe--would his august creator either. For
is not his work so full of quick, fiery, and delectable shapes as to be
perpetual sherris? And when time and season fit, what more can the heart
of man desire?

CHAMPFLEURY

The Man.

Champfleury--novelist, dramatist, archaeologist, humourist, and literary
historian--belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and
Philothee