The way in which this task has been performed is not entirely satisfactory, and many passionate admirers of the poet, the order of readers to whom it is dedicated, will feel disappointment and a regretful sense of its failing to fulfil what it undertook, increased by the conviction that, having been undertaken by the hand best fitted for it by natural propriety, it cannot be done again.  The book bears the relation to what one desired and expected that a bare diary does to the journal, or memoranda to the lecture.  It is a collection of notes on the life of Alfred de Musset, rather than a full memoir.  This inadequacy arises principally from the biographer himself.  Paul de Musset, the poet’s elder and only brother, is a man of taste and cultivation, a judge of art, literature, music and the drama, a person of charming manners and conversation, dignified, kindly, courteous, easy:  he was until middle age a busy, working man, whose leisure moments were occupied with writings that have found little favor, except the Femmes de la Regence and the pretty child’s story of M. le Vent et Mme. la Pluie, which latter has been translated.  He was the devoted, unselfish friend and mentor of Alfred, to whose juniority and genius he extended an indulgence of which he needed no share for himself:  in fact, he was the elder brother of the Prodigal in everything but want of generosity.  A more amiable portrait cannot be imagined than the one to be drawn of him from the history of his intercourse with his brother and from Alfred’s own letters and verses to him.  This, however, was not the person to give us such an account and analysis of the life and character of Alfred de Musset as the subject called for:  he has neither the necessary impartiality nor ability.  He is now seventy years old, and although, like his brother, he has the gift of appearing a decade less than his age, he is forced to remember that the time must come when he will no longer be here to defend his brother’s memory, which has suffered more than one cruel attack.  Having once had to silence calumny under cover of fiction, he naturally wished to put his name beyond the reach of being further traduced.  Whatever the shortcomings of the performance, it could not fail to be interesting.  It is written in an easy, well-bred style, like the author’s way of talking—­not without a sense of humor, with touching pride in his brother’s endowments, and tenderness toward faults which he does not deny.  In place of comprehensive views and sound judgment of Alfred de Musset’s genius and career, we have the knowledge of absolute intimacy and sympathy, candor, a hoard of reminiscences and details which could be gained from no other source, and, more than all, that certainty as to events and motives which can exist only where there has been a lifelong daily association without disguise or distrust.