struction, concision and polish of dialogue.

Her novel _Mauprat_ has many dramatic points, and she received a score
of applications for leave to adapt it to the stage. She preferred to
prepare the version herself, and it was played in the winter of 1853-4,
with moderate success. But it suffers fatally from comparison with its
original. An extreme instance is _Flaminio_ (1854), a protracted drama,
drawn by Madame Sand from her novelette _Teverino_. This is a
fantasy-piece whose audacity is redeemed, as are certain other
blemishes, by the poetic suggestiveness of the figure of Madeline, the
bird-charmer; whilst the picturesque sketch of Teverino, the idealized
Italian bohemian, too indolent to turn his high natural gifts to any
account, has proved invaluable to the race of novelists, who are not yet
tired of reproducing it in large. The work is one addressed mainly to
the imagination.

In the play we come down from the clouds; the poetry is gone, taste is
shocked, fancy uncharmed, the improbabilities become grotesque, and the
whole is distorted and tedious. Madame Sand's personages are never weary
of analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, so pleasant to read,
carries us swiftly and easily through her dissertations in print, before
we have time to tire of them. On the stage such colloquies soon appear
lengthy and unnatural. The climax of absurdity is reached in _Flaminio_,
where we find the adventurer expatiating to the man of the world on
"the divinity of his essence."

There is scarcely a department of theatrical literature in which Madame
Sand does not appear as an aspirant. She was a worshipper of
Shakespeare, acknowledging him as the king of dramatic writers. For her
attempt to adapt "As You Like It" to suit the tastes of a Parisian
audience, she disarms criticism by a preface in the form of a letter to
M. Regnier, of the Comedie Francaise, prefixed to the printed play. Here
she says plainly that to resolve to alter Shakespeare is to resolve to
murder, and that she aims at nothing more than at giving the French
public some idea of the original. In "As You Like It" the license of
fancy taken is too wide for the piece to be safely represented to her
countrymen, since it must jar terribly on "that French reason which,"
remarks Madame Sand, "we are so vain of, and which deprives us of so
many originalities quite as precious as itself." The fantastic, which
had so much attraction for her (possibly a result of he