rles de Bernard,
and remarking of Balzac and Dumas that the one is 'not fit for the
_salon_,' and the other 'about as genteel as a courier.' Balzac and
Dumas are only men of genius and great artists: the real thing is to be
'genteel' and write--as _Gerfeuil_ (_sic_) is written--'in a gentleman-
like style.' A few pages further on in the same pronouncement (a review
of _Jerome Paturot_), I find him quoting with entire approval Reybaud's
sketch of 'a great character, in whom the _habitue_ of Paris will perhaps
recognise a certain likeness to a certain celebrity of the present day,
by name Monsieur Hector Berlioz, the musician and critic.' The
description is too long to quote. It sparkles with all the _fadaises_ of
anti-Berliozian criticism, and the point is that the hero, after
conducting at a private party (which Berlioz never did) his own 'hymn of
the creation that has been lost since the days of the deluge,' 'called
for his cloak and his clogs, and walked home, where he wrote a critique
for the newspapers of the music which he had composed and directed.' In
the Gentlemanly Interest Mr. Titmarsh translates this sorry little libel
with the utmost innocence of approval. It is _The Paris Sketch-Book_
over again. That Monsieur Hector Berlioz may possibly have known
something of his trade and been withal as honest a man and artist as
himself seems never to have occurred to him. He knows nothing of
Monsieur Hector except that he is a 'hairy romantic,' and that whatever
he wrote it was not _Batti_, _batti_; but that nothing is enough.
'Whether this little picture is a likeness or not,' he is ingenuous
enough to add, 'who shall say?' But,--and here speaks the bold but
superior Briton--'it is a good caricature of a race in France, where
geniuses _poussent_ as they do nowhere else; where poets are prophets,
where romances have revelations.' As he goes on to qualify _Jerome
Paturot_ as a 'masterpiece,' and as 'three volumes of satire in which
there is not a particle of bad blood,' it seems fair to conclude that in
the Gentlemanly Interest all is considered fair, and that to accuse a man
of writing criticisms on his own works is to be 'witty and entertaining,'
and likewise 'careless, familiar, and sparkling' to the genteelest
purpose possible in this genteelest of all possible worlds.

DISRAELI

His Novels.

To the general his novels must always be a kind of caviare; for they have
no analogue in letters, but