wicked man he must be! Finally, I challenge altogether this charge against the French of want of earnestness. It is a common, narrow-minded English cant, quite unworthy of an accomplished gentleman like Mr. Besant. The great French people are no more to be judged by a few third-rate Parisian littérateurs than the English by the popular lady novelists of the day. And if there is light life in Paris (as well as profoundly serious), how much of it is encouraged by foreigners, including the virtuous English and Americans—the two people who, as we are aware, have the monopoly of virtue on this terrestrial globe? Were Pascal and his friends not earnest? Was not Fénelon? In our own day, Victor Hugo, Michelet, Quinet? The mass of the people sober, frugal, industrious? The men of the Revolutions, leaders of liberty in Europe, with their burning faith in humanity and progress, equality and fraternity? The French can laugh and enjoy themselves more gaily and gracefully than we, without getting stolidly besotted; therefore they are frivolous! They have had many pleasant humorists, therefore they are not earnest ! It might as well be argued from their jolly old songs and the glorious humour of Burns (whose laughter is rich and deep-chested as Rabelais') that the Scotch are without earnestness!

On the whole, while conscious that I have neither the knowledge nor the intellect required for judging so large a question, I am inclined to look up to Rabelais as the greatest genius in French literature. Perhaps the very finest work in that literature has been done by Pascal, but Pascal's finest work is a series of fragments; and while as profound, he is

narrow as an artesian well, in comparison with the oceanic amplitude and energy, as well as depth, of Rabelais. Of the humour I say nothing-it is proverbial; a frank, jolly laughter, unrestrained, diluvian, immense, inextinguishable as the laughter of the gods. His enormous erudition and knowledge are mere toys for his playtime; but throughout his whole work, or play, he gives you the sense of easiest power and mastery at home in everything, rising with its theme as readily as it falls, never strained or fatigued, able to do what it likes, equal and more than equal to far more arduous things if it cared to undertake them; in short, with an indefinite reserve of capacity in all directions: and this I take to be the impression which only a supreme and Titanic genius can produce.

SAINT-AMANT

I

THIS most jolly and genial smoker, toper, rover, soldier, and poet, after deservedly enjoying great celebrity during his lifetime, was almost forgotten, even in France, until Philarète Chasles called attention to him by a brilliant article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1839, under the title, "The Victims of Boileau: I. The Guzzlers (Goinfres). Marc-Antoine de Gérard de Saint-Amant." This was followed, in 1844, by Théophile Gautier's sympathetic and picturesque sketch in Les Grotesques, a series of ten. portraits of half or wholly forgotten French humorous and humoristic poets, from Villon to Scarron, including Théophile Viau and Cyrano de Bergerac, also men of real genius. Finally, in 1855, C. L. Livet edited, with a careful prefatory memoir, a complete edition of his works, including many pieces never before published, in two vols., in the Bibliothèque Elzevirienne (P. Janet, Paris), so that all the world might again read what all the world had of old admired. In English the only notice of him that I have met occurs in that bright and pleasant book, "The French Humourists from the 12th to the 19th Century," by Walter Besant, author of "Studies in

Early French Poetry." The above have mainly furnished the materials for the following article.

Marc-Antoine de Gérard, Sieur de Saint-Amant, was born, in 1594, at Rouen, near the famous abbey of Saint-Amant, whence he took the name by which he is generally known, and died at Paris on the 29th December, 1661. The details for his biography are but scanty, and chiefly drawn from scattered statements and allusions in his own writings. His father was a distinguished naval officer, two-and-twenty years in the service of our Elizabeth, in which he attained the command of a squadron. At one period of his life he fell into the hands of the Turks, and was for three years a prisoner in the Black Tower at Constantinople. His two brothers perished fighting against the Turks— the one at the mouth of the Red Sea, the other, who had served under Gustavus Adolphus, at Candia, where he commanded a French regiment in the Venetian service. Two of his cousins-german also fell fighting the Turks, and one of his uncles had been in slavery amongst them. Thus our poet had plenty of family reasons for detesting those infidels; and his natural love and reverence for wine may have been intensified by the fact that it was forbidden by the Prophet. His education was considerably neglected, as his father could not attend to it, and his mother seems to have died when he was young. Thus he learnt neither Greek nor Latin; but, as he tells us himself, the familiar conversation of people in good society, and the diversity of wonderful things he saw in his travels, afterwards remedied the defects in his early training. He also mastered Spanish, Italian, and English; was an excellent musician and elocu

tionist, reciting his own compositions so well that an epigram, attributed to Gombaud, remonstrates

"Your verse is fine when you declaim,

But, when I read it, very tame :

You can't continually recite ;

So such as I can read, pray write.”

But we must not accept an epigram au pied de la

We are told that three nearly drowned in the

lettre, as our neighbours say. times in his youth he was Seine; and he certainly had a holy horror of fresh water ever after. While yet quite young he became distinguished as a passionate lover of good eating, and yet more of good drinking; and his society was much sought after by the jolly nobles of Louis XIII., not yet cowed by the stern discipline of Richelieu. Although he was very free in his speech, he never abused their familiarity, and they held him in singular esteem. He was soon attached to the household of one of the greatest of these, the Duke de Retz, with whom he retired to the domain of Belle-Isle, which the duke's father, backed by his relative, Catherine de Medici, with whom he had come from Florence, had forced the monks to sell to him at a low price. Here Saint-Amant lived truly in clover, as, indeed, he managed, without any management or forethought, to live nearly all his life. M. Livet cites a letter, to which I shall have to refer again when I come to speak of the poems, from a M. Roger, Commissary of the Navy at Belle-Isle, to Desforges-Maillard. The writer had in his family old relatives, to whom one of his ancestors, seneschal of the isle, had communicated the following details: "The poet lived at Belle-Isle several years. He there composed a great part of his

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