is merely the order of profuse and purposeless ornament laid on as if with a trowel. This, indeed, seems to be the bane of modern domestic architecture,―minute, elaborate, heaped-up decoration. We must run glittering like a brook in the open sunshine or we are unblest." Plain living, so far as the exterior of our houses is concerned, if not high thinking, is no more, and will be no more while the prevailing architect believes that decoration is synonymous with beauty and its absence with the reverse. Besides these, certain abnormal developments of the bastard Queen Anne style might be named; and here and there one may discern symptoms of the sky-scraping structures of New York, and newer London, as yet, however, mere pigmies by comparison, sky-scrapers, as it were, in the bud. But the subject is trite, and the multiplication of unfortunate modern instances is superfluous and unprofitable.

It is, therefore, a relief to turn to the many admirable examples of purely modern building,-examples good in themselves and in complete harmony with the older environment—which are to be found in the towns in question, and also in the country. These sufficiently prove the possibility of handing down the architectural succession in a line of almost unbroken excellence; and prove also that the bad instances just cited are not an absolutely necessary product of our time and conditions. But there is another factor in good building besides felicity of design, which we are told can no longer be counted on. the human factor; the old "village workman who knew all kinds of work and built in unconscious, simple picturesqueness," and to whom the older building owes its admirable and enduring qualities. At what precise period he became extinct we know not; No. 435.-VOL. LXIII.

This is

but although his homely art probably began to decline two hundred or more years ago, we are disposed to think it was not finally crushed out by the all-pervading power of machinery until about thirty years since, for up to the latter date evidences of its existence are to be found. It is unquestionable, however, that he is extinct now, and that the common craftsman of to-day if left to himself will not build in unconscious, simple picturesqueness, but in exactly the reverse manner; hence the too wellgrounded fear for the future of permanently good architecture.

"My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton," says Lucy Snowe in VILLETTE. We have long been trying to find this delectable Bretton, and its "handsome house" with "clear, wide windows looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide;" and although we are not yet certain of the identity of either, we believe the town to be one of the smaller country or market towns, which, though not presided over by cathedral or abbey, may yet be called "gracious." These smaller English towns, with many others that have neither court nor market, form a pleasant if not indispensable chapter of the architectural volume. They have, or should have, at least one very gray and ancient parish church with spire, or tower, seen from afar; a goodly grammar school of King Edward's, or some respectable later foundation; a picturesque manor house; and a circulating library. The centre of the whole system, however, if one may so speak, is the High Street. In this "fine antique" thoroughfare, besides the grammar school and the library, are, or should be, one or two ancient inns and posting houses,-a Blue Boar or a Green Dragon; the sleepy country bank, the post-office,

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the shops; and, either in or near it, a score or so of old brick, stucco, or stone, dwellings of the type of the handsome house in VILLETTE. They are not always very old, these houses, most of them having been built, as we surmise, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years ago; and hence they belong to the order of modern, or middle-age, antiquity. But although very plain in the matter of ornament,-often indeed without any other than their immaculate curtains, bow-pots, and clambering vines -they are in many cases serenely beautiful, and put wholly out of countenance the more elaboratelytricked mansions of to-day. And besides their intrinsic charm they have another interest. For in them, and in such towns as these, lived, moved, and had their being, no small number of those illustrious personages of modern, or relatively modern, fiction, whose fame as we said, has gone out into all the earth. Middlemarch was such a town as this; Mr. Pecksniff dwelt in one of these houses; Lilly Dale in another, and better; in these ancient inns sojourned Pickwick the immortal, and his philosophic followers; the inspired young curates and vicars of Dr. Macdonald ministered, and may yet minister, in these gray churches; here lived Adam Bede, Amos Barton, Mr. Gilfil, the repentant Janet, and the evangelical Mr. Tryon, the elder Pendennis, Dr. Thorne, Mr. Crawley-the names would fill a book. And besides these, there is, perhaps,

an equally delightful host still waiting in the limbo of unwritten fiction who may one day come forth and inhabit these pleasant mansions. Hence on more than one account, the regret that these smaller towns, like the larger ones we have mentioned, should be invaded by the spoiler, that these beautiful old English houses should ever be supplanted by the French roof, the cathedral villa, and the much adorned nondescript.

But we are told that such things must be after our famous victories in science, mechanics, and commerce;

we must bear the penalty of the resultant ugliness. Perhaps not; with the bane is found also the antidote.

Our very activities may, and do, sharpen our perception both of excellence and of its pernicious contrary. We may yet awake to the fact that these humbler pages of our national chronicle are in their degree as worthy to be preserved as the more splendid ones. And when it has finally dawned upon us that the old streets and houses which so charm the hometurning Americans, and which are beginning to interest the Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, are after all a valuable part of our common architectural heritage, we may perhaps not waste and destroy them so wantonly as we do. Only the awakening must not be too long deferred; for the grim wolf gnaws steadily, and once lost they will not be easily restored.

FRENCHWOMEN have always played a part in the history of their country's literature, but comparatively seldom through the writing of books. The poets and authors among them have worked on an equality with men and charmed their generation, but they have often sacrificed personal influence to their talent and labour. On the other hand the women whose names survive longest have often subordinated their literary instincts to the interests of their salon and conversation, or of their friendships and correspondence. In our own century we can cite Mme. de Beaumont, Mme. de Custine, and Eugénie de Guérin, among women who gave abundant proof of the faculty for writing, and who left only journals and letters; Eugénie de Guérin's pen was devoted exclusively to a brother of genius. These are the feminine names longest remembered in France. The novelists are often strangely forgotten; the letter-writers make landmarks for the critics of all time; their names appear again and again, and seem to form a family with long descent.

We are reminded of this family by the recent death in Paris of Mdlle.

Jenny Dacquin, whose name will always be identified with a literary friendship. The greatest reserve, almost a mystery indeed, was always maintained about her personality; but in April, 1892, she made herself known finally in L'INTERMÉDIAIRE DES CHERCHEURS, the French publication answering to NOTES AND QUERIES, as the owner and publisher of the famous LETTRES À UNE INCONNUE written by Prosper Mérimée. Mdlle. Dacquin

was a woman of wide culture, and it was a terrible threat held over her by Mérimée that she would one day write a book. But she never did so; she served literature in another way, the way of friendship, which depends also on the pen; only we shall never see her letters which called forth Mérimée's. In this Magazine it was lately pointed out how much the publication of the LETTRES À UNE INCONNUE had done for his memory.1 It had become the fashion in France to regard the subtle critic and fastidious man of letters as a monster without human feelings, a despiser of women, a hater of children, above all, an Anglomaniac and a flatterer at St. Cloud in the last days of the Empire,traits especially hateful to the French after the downfall. His death had taken place in the midst of the great tragedy. It was scarcely noticed; but the LETTRES À UNE INCONNUE, published in 1873, revived an interest in him which is alive at this day.

Mdlle. Dacquin died in last March at 35 Rue Jacob, where she had lived for forty-three years. She was a lover of English literature, the friend of Englishwomen, and, though she wrote no book, it seems possible at this day to find in her character the notes of a true literary life free from that which oftenest mars it, the passion for celebrity. She was born about 1814, the daughter of a country solicitor of high standing at Boulogne, who lost his fortune but preserved an honour able name. If we would believe our fathers, Boulogne sixty years ago was very different from the Boulogne of 1 PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, November, 1895.

our day, and French society, to which English people were then sometimes admitted in Paris and elsewhere, there presented a tone and a cultivation unknown at this day in provincial towns. However this may be, it is recorded that Mdlle. Dacquin was witty, vivacious, and mature at the age of twenty in this society, and that her education was completed with great care. We are not, however, called upon to give Boulogne credit for a culture which Taine afterwards described as "composite," Mérimée spoke of as "summing up for him more or less a whole civilisation." She had corresponded a year or two with Mérimée when he thus wrote.

and

M. Dacquin's family consisted of his daughter Jenny, and two sons. One of them died young but full of promise; the other was a distinguished officer in the French army, with whom Jenny lived in close and affectionate relationship till his death, and whose wife and daughter formed her family circle until her own death. After her father's loss of fortune she went to England as companion to Lady M, and it was from England, about 1831, that she posted her first letter to Mérimée. She had been reading a novel by the rising writer called UNE CHRONIQUE DU REGNE DE CHARLES IX., and amused herself by sending her reflections to the author under the name of an English lady, on scented note-paper stamped with a coronet. The reflections were to the point. Mérimée addressed a courteous answer to "Lady A. Seymour" in an English country house. A correspondence followed. We need not ask at what point Mérimée began to discover his favourite form of adventure, a feminine intrigue. All we know is that years passed, and they were still corresponding unknown to each other; but the mask

had long been forgotten'; the reality was something that enchanted him; there was no Lady Seymour, only a French girl with a strange capacity for falling in with his intellectual whim, but who eluded closer knowledge and mystified him in a thousand ways. Only after great difficulty and much persuasion he obtained permission to visit his mysterious correspondent, when on a visit to London in December, 1840. He found a woman with raven hair, a face powerful with vitality if not with beauty, black eyes which we know to have been full of radiance and vivacity, but which he pleased himself at all times by calling wicked; a Southerner among Southerners but conforming to the social standards of the Northerners he liked best. Lady M received Mérimée in England and remained his friend until her death in 1862. Mdlle. Dacquin was the woman he was looking for. He was forty; he had had deep experience of women in society and also of those on whom its doors are shut; all his souvenirs were unsatisfactory except one, as he told Ampère subsequently when they were travelling in Greece, and that was a French girl in England, for whom he picked a flower at Thermopyla. In her he found the friend, the elective affinity, as he tells her suddenly in after life, in the midst of a discourse on the new crinoline. She was no bluestocking, but she cared for intellectual things with an epicurean appetite perhaps unknown to the bluestocking. The caviare of intercourse with Mérimée was worth more to her than domestic happiness; and this was an all important point to him, who, like Swift in this one respect if not in several others, was in love but did not wish to marry.

The author of UNE CHRONIQUE DU RÈGNE DE CHARLES IX. was a figure likely to occupy a woman's imagina

tion. Under a cold exterior, with the manners of diplomacy (like Lord Clarendon's whom, it was said, Mérimée imitated,) and a reserve of which he carried the secret engraved on a ring, Remember to beware, he had sensibilities displayed only to a few, and a strong need for the affection of women, which made him almost pathetic in his lonely life, spent between dim country towns where he was perpetually at work on archæology, and his mother's apartments in Paris, where his cats and a little favourite owl were his solace. Fame came to him amidst revolutions political and literary. He was the enemy of all inflation, a despiser of his own day, a lover of Shakespeare whom he knew as well as he did Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Cervantes; eager for fresh observation in his friends and to see through their eyes, and thus far inconsistent with his motto; but his inconsistencies helped perhaps more than all else to make him the interesting friend that he remained for more than thirty years. From the time of their meeting in London, as Academician, as Senator, as Court favourite, Mérimée never failed Jenny Dacquin.

About 1835 Mdlle. Dacquin was left a very small fortune by a friend. Her father was dead and she was enabled to settle in Paris with her mother. The only restraint that ever seems to fall upon Mérimée's letters is just at this time, when he makes up his mind that after the French fashion she will marry, being now mistress of a dowry, however small. This danger was minimised, however, by comparisons: "Il n'avait pas plus de distinction que mon bonnet de nuit," she said of one of her suitors; and in 1842 Mérimée seems to have met her in Paris every day. Sometimes it was at a box at the opera which he sent her; or it would be an archæological rendezvous in the environs of Paris, during

the time of lilacs or when the chestnut-shells covered the ground. Now began the romance of Mdlle. Dacquin's life, ever associated with the bright days of her first life in Paris. "You may well love Paris," Mérimée wrote to her in calmer years. "Where would you find outside of it such walks, such alleys, such museums as those where we have had so many things to say to each other, and so many tender things?" Correspondence was unremitting between all these meetings, and we have the history of them in notes written before or after the walk, or the pilgrimage to some shrine of antiquity. Her situation at this time was neither more nor less independent than that of an Englishwoman of thirty of our own day living alone with her mother. At the theatre she was accompanied by her brother. In all early years of intercourse it is clear that Mdlle. Dacquin had one plan and Mérimée another. He, as we have said, did not wish to marry: she would take no other view of love than that it led to marriage; but she had gauged the situation from the first and only wished to retain his friendship. Hence came endless reproaches on his part, which ring at times so bitterly that some readers of the Letters may think that Mérimée was sincerely unhappy, and that she was cruel and cold. But he had given her a broad, general rule to go by in one of his letters at the outset of the correspond