years; it partook at one time of the character of love, at another of that of simple friendship, and Mérimée is exhibited in the letters under the most surprisingly diverse lights, most of them more or less amiable, and all interesting. The correspondence with Panizzi has somewhat less personal interest. But Mérimée often visited England, where he had many friends (among whom the late Mr Ellice of Glengarry was the chief), and certain similarities of taste drew him closer to Panizzi personally, while during part of the empire the two served as the channel for a kind of unofficial diplomacy between the emperor and certain English statesmen. These letters are full of shrewd aperçus on the state of Europe at different times. Both series, and others since published, abound in gossip, in amusing anecdotes, in sharp literary criticism, while both contain evidences of a cynical and Rabelaisian or Swiftian humour which was very strong in Mérimée. This characteristic is said to be so prominent in a correspondence with another friend, which now lies in the library at Avignon, that there is but little chance of its ever being printed. A fourth collection of letters, of much inferior extent and interest, has been printed by Blaze de Bury under the title of Lettres à une autre inconnue (1873), and others still by d’Haussonville (1888), and in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1896). In the latter years of his life Mérimée suffered very much from ill-health. It was necessary for him to pass all his winters at Cannes, where his constant companions were two aged English ladies, friends of his mother. The Terrible Year found him completely broken in health and anticipating the worst for France. He lived long enough to see his fears realized, and to express his grief in some last letters, and he died at Cannes on the 23rd of September 1870.
Mérimée’s character was a peculiar and in some respects an unfortunate one, but by no means unintelligible. Partly by temperament, partly it is said owing to some childish experience, when he discovered that he had been duped and determined never to be so again, not least owing to the example of Henri Beyle (Stendhal), who was a friend of his family, and of whom he saw much, Mérimée appears at a comparatively early age to have imposed upon himself as a duty the maintenance of an attitude of sceptical indifference and sarcastic criticism. Although a man of singularly warm and affectionate feelings, he obtained the credit of being a cold-hearted cynic; and, though both independent and disinterested, he was abused as a hanger-on of the imperial court. Both imputations were wholly undeserved, and indeed were prompted to a great extent by political spite or by the resentment felt by his literary equals on the other side at the cool ridicule with which he met them. But he deserved in some of the bad as well as many of the good senses of the term the name of a man of the Renaissance. He had the warm partisanship and amiability towards friends and the scorpion-like sting for his foes, he had the ardent delight in learning and especially in matters of art and belles lettres, he had the scepticism, the voluptuousness, the curious delight in the contemplation of the horrible, which marked the men of letters of the humanist period. Even his literary work has this Renaissance character. It is tolerably extensive, amounting to some seventeen or eighteen volumes, but its bulk is not great for a life which was not short, and which was occupied, at least nominally, in little else. About a third of it consists of the letters already mentioned. Rather more than another third consists of the official work which has been already alluded to—reports, essays, short historical sketches, the chief of which latter is a history of Pedro the Cruel (1843), and another of the curious pretender known in Russian story as the false Demetrius (1852). Some of the literary essays, such as those on Beyle, on Turgueniev, &c., where a personal element enters, are excellent. Against others and against the larger historical sketches—admirable as they are—Taine’s criticism that they want life has some force. They are, however, all marked by Mérimée’s admirable style, by his sound and accurate scholarship, his strong intellectual grasp of whatever he handled, his cool unprejudiced views, his marvellous faculty of designing and proportioning the treatment of his work. In purely archaeological matters his Description des peintures de Saint-Savin is very noteworthy. It is, however, in the remaining third of his work, consisting entirely of tales either in narrative or in dramatic form, and especially in the former, that his full power is perceived. He translated a certain number of things (chiefly from the Russian); but his fame does not rest on these, on his already-mentioned youthful supercheries, or on his later semi-dramatic works. There remain about a score of tales, extending in point of composition over exactly forty years and in length from that of Colomba, the longest, which fills about one hundred and fifty pages, to that of l’Enlèvement de la redoute (1829), which fills just half a dozen. They are unquestionably the best things of their kind written during the century, the only nouvelles that can challenge comparison with them being the very best of Gautier, and one or two of Balzac. The motives are sufficiently different. In Colomba and Mateo Falcone (1829), the Corsican point of honour is drawn on; in Carmen (written apparently after reading Borrow’s Spanish books), the gipsy character; in la Venus d'Ille (1837) and Lokis (two of the finest of all), certain grisly superstitious, in the former case that known in a milder form as the ring given to Venus, in the latter a variety of the were-wolf fancy. Arséne Guillot is a singular satire, full of sarcastic pathos, on popular morality and religion; la Chamber bleue, an 18th-century conte, worthy of C. P. J. Crébillon for grace and wit, and superior to him in delicacy; The Capture of the Redoubt just mentioned is a perfect piece of description; l'Abbé au bain is again satirical; la Double méprise (the authorship of which was objected to Mérimée when he was elected of the Academy) is an exercise in analysis strongly impregnated with the spirit of Stendhal, but better written than anything of that writer’s. These stories, with his letters, assure Mérimée’s place in literature at the very head of the French prose writers of the century. He had undertaken an edition of Brantôme for the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne, but it was never completed.
Mérimée’s works have only been gradually published since his death. There is no uniform edition, but almost everything is obtainable in the collections of MM. Charpentier and Calmann Lévy. Most of the sets of letters above referred to from those to the first inconnue, where the introduce was Taine, have essay-prefaces on Mérimée. Maurice Tourneux’s Prosper Mérimée, sa bibliographie (1876) and Prosper Mérimée, ses portraits (1879), are useful, while Émile Faguet and many other critics have dealt with him incidentally. But the best single book on him by far is the Mérimée et ses amis of Augustin Filon (1894). M. F. Chambon’s Correspondence inédite (1897) gives little that is substantive, but supplies and corrects a good many gaps or faults in earlier editions. English translations, especially of Colomba and Carmen, are numerous. The Chronique de Charles IX. was translated by G. Saintsbury in 1889 with an introduction; and the same writer has also prefixed a much more elaborate essay, containing a review of Mérimée’s entire work, to an American translation. (G. Sa.)
MERINO, the Spanish name for a breed of sheep, and hence applied to a woollen fabric. The Spanish word is generally taken to be an adaptation to the sheep of the name of an official (merino) who inspected sheep pastures. This word is from the medieval Latin majorinus, a steward, head official of a village, &c., from major, greater.
The merino is a white short-wool sheep, the male having spiral horns, the ewes being generally hornless. It is bred chiefly for its wool, because, though an excellent grazer and very adaptable, it matures slowly and its mutton is not of the best quality. The wool is close and wavy in staple, reaching 4 in. in length, and surpasses that of all other sheep in fineness; it is so abundant that little but the muzzle, which should be of an orange tint, and hoofs, are left uncovered. The best wool is produced on light sandy soils.
The merino is little known in Great Britain, the climatic moisture of which does not favour the growth of the finest wools, but it predominates in all regions where sheep are bred for their wool rather than their mutton, as in the western United States, Cape Colony, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina. In Australasia, especially in New Zealand, the merino has been crossed with Lincolns, Leicesters, Shropshires and other breeds, with the result of improving the quality
