The tales of which it consists
are for the most part very short, some being rather sketches or outlines
of tales than actually worked-out stories, so that, although there
are no less than a hundred and twenty-nine of them, the whole book is
probably not half the bulk of the _Heptameron_ itself. But they are
extremely well written, and the specially interesting thing about them
is, that in them there appears, and appears for the first time (unless
we take the _Heptameron_ itself as earlier, which is contrary to all
probability), the singular and, at any rate to some persons, very
attractive mixture of sentiment and satire, of learning and a love of
refined society, of joint devotion to heavenly and earthly love, of
voluptuous enjoyment of the present, blended and shadowed with a
sense of the night that cometh, which delights us in the prose of the
_Heptameron_, and in the verse not only of all the Pleiade poets in
France, but of Spenser, Donne, and some of their followers in England.
The scale of the stories, which are sometimes mere anecdotes, is so
small, the room for miscellaneous discourse in them is so scanty, and
the absence of any connecting links, such as those of Margaret's own
plan, checks the expression of personal feeling so much, that it is
only occasionally that this cast of thought can be perceived.
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