Petronius should die, that Socrates of dilettanteisin opened his veins
as calmly as if he were making an eveniug call, talked with his friends about the songs and the trifles of the hour, laughed and chatted gaily, and then fell asleep in death, with as little sign of concern as if he had only been going
to rest for the night. Merimee might have displayed the same luxurious contempt for emotion if he had lived at the Court of Nero, and poetic fancy might proclaim that Merimee was Petronius come to life again. But he was not the Petronius of Pagan Rome. All his trying could not reproduce its Olympian stoicism, and in spite of himself, he was a Christianised Frenchman. A monkish legend says that when the Emperor Julian fell under a Persian dart, he plucked it from the fatal wound, and, remembering his apostacy, exclaimed, ",Galilean, thou hast con- quered !" So might also have exclaimed the baffled Paganism of Merimee. He, and such as he, can bring back the vice of Greece, but they can never bring back the fullness of its beauty or the heartless gaiety of its spirit.
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