[280] For that, see Chapter XII.
[281] See below on the version Introduction to the Quatre Facardins.
[282] Including miscellaneous imbecility and unsuitableness as well as moral indecorum.
[283] Written for the Fortnightly Review in 1882, but by a chapter of accidents not printed till 1890. Reprinted next year in Essays on French Novelists (London, 1891).
[284] Miss Ruth Clark.
[285] The conclusion of Vathek is of course undoubtedly more "admirable" than anything of Hamilton's; but it is in a quite different genus.
[286] The piece Celle que j'adore is the best of the casual verses, though there are other good songs, etc. Those which alternate with the prose of some of the tales are too often (as in the case of the Cabinet insets, v. sup.) rather prosaic. Of the prose miscellanies the so-called Relations "of different places in Europe," and "of a voyage to Mauritania," contain some of the cream of Hamilton's almost uniquely ironic narrative and commentary. When that great book, "The Nature and History of Irony," which has to be written is written—the last man died with the last century and the next hour seems far off—a contrast of Hamilton and Kinglake will probably form part of it.
[287] As a member, though a cadet, of a cadet branch of one of the noblest families of Great Britain and Ireland.
[288] As a soldier, a courtier of Charles II., and a Jacobite exile in France.
[289] I may perhaps be allowed to refer to another essay of mine on him in Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1892). It contains a full account, and some translation, of the Conversation du maréchal d'Hocquincourt avec le Père Canaye, which is at once the author's masterpiece of quiet irony, his greatest pattern for the novelist, and his clearest evidence of influence on Hamilton.