Vêtu du sarrau bleu, coiffé du grand chapeau,
Parmi les paysans, je vivrais comme un sage,
Attrapant chaque jour une rime au passage.
Et que d'humbles plaisirs antiques, mais permis
Dont je ne parle pas ! Avec de bons amis,
Tous au même soleil, comme on serait à l'aise !
Le soir sous la tonnelle on porterait sa chaise.*

66

These verses, and particularly the little piece which finishes "What changes not in me is friendship,” remind me, in spite of myself, of Xenophon's eulogy of the two Greek generals, who perished by treason in the midst of the Persians. Agias of Arcadia and Socrates of Achaia were put to death. Irreproachable towards their friends, they were never backward in the fight. Both were about thirty-five years of age."

A touching and exquisite homage, which it is impossible to hear unmoved.

We have seen the quality of M. Gabriel Vicaire, poet of La Bresse. We have found him the most charming and exquisite of the rustic poets. He has for some years been seeking the golden flower of legend. He has put into charming verse the pious tale, so popular in old France, of St. Nicolas and the three children in the salting-tub. M. Paul Sébillot justly observes that "this attempt demonstrates that, if we lack the treasury of popular poems possessed by our neighbours, it is the fault, not of

* Clad in a blue smock, with a big hat,
Amidst the peasants, I'd live like a sage,
Daily catching a rhyme in its flight.

And what humble, old-world, but permissible pleasures,
Of which I do not speak! With good friends

All under the same sun, how comfortable we should be!

In the evening we'd place our chairs under the arbour.

the genius of our idiom, but of the poets who have disdained this source of inspiration.'

This poem of M. Vicaire's has the perfume of the wild strawberry. Nothing could be more fragrant than the verses which describe the three little victims, whose life was miraculously preserved by the holy Bishop in the old salting-tub which should have been their coffin:

La mort n'a pas flétri cette fleur d'innocence ;
Ils dorment aussi purs qu'au jour de leur naissance.
Le songe de leur vie est à peine achevé,

Et sur leur bouche encor flotte un dernier Ave.*

St. Nicolas loves children and poets, who are equally innocent. He answers their prayers. He has inspired M. Vicaire with some adorable verses. But the Saint is not lacking in rancour, and he exacts vengeance for offences committed in his name. The following story is proof thereof. I have it on the authority of Dom Mabillon.

In the town of Charité-sur-Loire there flourished in days gone by a monastery placed under the patronage of the Holy Cross. The feast of St. Nicolas was at hand. "What office shall we sing?" asked the monks of the Prior. "We should much like to sing the office proper to the great St. Nicolas." The Prior would not allow it, alleging as a reason that it was not sung at Cluny. The monks maintained that they were in no way compelled to follow the Cluny rite, and they insisted on singing the proper office of the blessed Bishop of Myra. In order to prevent their doing so, and to

* Death has not withered the flower of their innocence;
They sleep, as pure as the day of their birth.
The dream of their life is hardly finished,

And still on their lips floats a last Ave.

recall them to obedience, the Prior administered discipline. This action did not go unpunished. For, night having come, and the Prior being in bed, he saw St. Nicolas enter his cell in person, where he administered discipline to him in turn, with a cat-o'-nine-tails, in order to compel him to sing the ancient office which he had previously refused. With the assistance of the whip, the Prior sang so high and clear that the monks, awakened by the noise, ran to his cell. He turned his back, and sent them away, being very angry. He realized, on the following day, owing to the pain in his back, the reality of the night's vision, but he imagined that he had been flogged by his monks. This opinion proves his stubbornness. How much better inspired was M. Vicaire than the Prior of the Holy Cross !

BARON DENON *

T Paris, in the reign of Louis XVIII, there lived a happy man. He was old. He lived on the Quai Voltaire, in the house now bearing the number nine, whose ground floor is at present occupied by the learned Honoré Champion and his publishing house. The quiet front of the house, pierced by tall, slightly-arched windows, recalls, in its aristocratic simplicity, the time of Gabriel and Louis. It was thither that, after the fall of the Empire, Dominique-Vivant Denon, late gentleman of the King's bedchamber, late attaché to an embassy, late Director-General of the Fine Arts, member of the Institute, Baron of the Empire, and officer of the Legion of Honour, retired with his collections and his memories. In cabinets made by the cabinet-maker Boule for Louis XIV he had arranged the marbles, antique bronzes, painted vases, enamels, and medals collected during half a century of a wandering and interesting life; and he lived, smiling, in the midst of these riches. On the walls of his rooms there hung a few choice

*Point de lendemain, conte (par le baron Denon) illustré de treize compositions de Paul Avril. Paris. P. Rouquette, éditeur.

pictures, a fine landscape by Ruysdael, a portrait of Molière by Sébastien Bourdon, a Giotto, a Fra Bartolommeo, and some Guercinos, then highly thought of. The honest man who preserved them had a great deal of taste and few preferences. He knew how to enjoy all that gives pleasure. Side by side with his Greek vases and antique marbles he kept Chinese porcelain and Japanese bronzes. He did not even disdain the arts of barbarism. He would gladly show a bronze figure of Carolingian style, whose stone eyes and golden hands evoked screams from the ladies to whom Canova had taught all the suavities of the plastic art. Denon endeavoured to class these monuments of art in a philosophical order, and he proposed to publish a description of them; for, wise to the end, he set age at defiance by forming new projects. He was too much a man of the eighteenth century to refuse sentiment a place in his rich collection. Being in possession of a beautiful reliquary of the fifteenth century, stolen doubtless during the Terror, he had enriched it with some new relics, not one of which had proceeded from the body of a saint. He was not in the least mystical, and never was there a man less fitted to understand Christian asceticism. The monks inspired him only with disgust. He was born too soon to taste, as a dilettante, like Chateaubriand, the masterpieces of penitence. His profane reliquary contained a little of the ashes of Héloïse, found in the tomb of the Paraclete; a small portion of the beautiful body of Inez de Castro, whom a royal lover had exhumed in order to adorn her with a diadem; a few hairs from the grey moustache of Henry IV; some of the bones of Molière and La Fontaine, one of Voltaire's teeth, a lock of