Last, our host, speaking in his turn, recited some stanzas inspired by the beautiful Lake of Nemi, on the banks of which M. Renan placed the scene of one of his philosophic dramas:

Sur la montagne, où sont les antiques débris

D'Albe, et l'humble berceau des fondateurs de ville,
Nous allions tout un jour en récitant Virgile,
Et, graves, nous marchions dans les genêts fleuris.

Sur la mousse et les fleurs, cherchant la trace humaine,
Au désert de la plaine, au silence des bois,

Nous demandions les murs qui virent autrefois
Les premiers rois courbés sous la force romaine.

Nous eûmes pour abri ta colline, ô Némi !
Quand le soir descendit sur la route indécise,
Nous écoutâmes naître, et venir dans la brise
Le murmure à nos pieds de ton lac endormi.

Les voix du jour mourant se taisaient une à une,
Et l'ombre grandissait aux flancs du mont Latin.
De mystérieux cors sonnaient dans le lointain ;
Les flots légers fuyaient aux clartés de la lune.

La lune qui montait au front du ciel changeant,
Sous les feuillages noirs dressait de blancs portiques,
Et nous vîmes alors, ainsi qu'aux jours antiques
Diane se pencher sur le miroir d'argent.*

Such, friend, is love in a Breton soul;
Enduring, it is the rock planted in the waves.
The impassible granite hears the thundering sea,
The tempest lulls it in a magical dream.

Let other women be as unstable as the wave;
The gulfs at our feet will open in vain ;
The flower of our love, while the ocean roars,
Will bloom on our brows.

* On the mountain, where lie the ancient remains

Of Alba, and the humble cradle of the City's founders,
Reciting Virgil, we wandered a whole day,

And gravely walked amidst the flowering broom.

With these verses ended that beautiful day, a day of sound scholarship and gay science. Was there ever a time when scholars were as lovable as to-day? I do not believe it.

Under moss and flowers, looking for human traces,
In the deserted plain, the silent woods,

We sought the walls which aforetime saw,
The first kings bowed beneath the power of Rome.

We had your hill for shelter, O Nemi!
When evening fell on the faintly-marked road,
We heard born, and travelling on the breeze,
The murmur at our feet of your sleeping lake.

The voices of the dying day fell silent one by one,
The shadow lengthened on the flank of Monte Latino;
In the distance there sounded mysterious horns;
The light waves fled in the beams of the moon.

The moon, climbing the brow of the changing sky,
Under the black foliage raised up white porticoes,

And we saw then, as in the days of old,
Diana bending over the silver mirror.

AUGUSTE VACQUERIE*

ANKY, thin, with large features and a rough beard, he recalls the busts of ancient philosophers-Antisthenes, Aristippus, Xenocrates, etc.—with which the collectors of the seventeenth century decorated their galleries and libraries. Resembling them, he has a meditative air, spontaneous and kindly: on seeing him, one divines that his speech, like that of Diogenes and Menippus, will possess the mordant power and the symmetry of clean-cut maxims. Owing to an expression of satirical good-nature he also bears a likeness to the hermits one sees in the vignettes of Eisen and Gravelot. Better still, he is the village soothsayer; he has all his rustic perspicacity. I met him one day in a park, under the shadow of a hornbeam, beneath an old Faun who, smiling on his block of mossy stone, was playing a flute. Philosopher, recluse, and rustic demi-god-Auguste Vacquerie has a touch of them all. I would like to show him to you talking to his friends in the evening. He speaks without movement or gesture. He seems a stranger to what he says. His great face, furrowed by an ascetic smile, wears an inattentive expression; only the eye, black and lively, is animated. His voice is drawling and monotonous. But as it flows his speech

* Futura, 1 vol. in 8°.

awakes strange, coloured images, expands into combinations both eccentric and exact, and abounds in geometric fantasies which are one of the original features of this precise poet's mind. He is the simplest person in the world, and loves retirement. Something in his quiet person reveals a lover of gardens and pictures, a connoisseur, with an intelligent affection for beautiful things.

Strong and hard-working, he believes that work makes life often happy, and always endurable. For over forty years he worked as a journalist with admirable punctuality. He began, under the monarchy of July, on the Globe, and on Girardin's La Presse. In 1848 he directed l'Événement, which, suppressed by the Republic, became l'Avènement du peuple. On December 2nd the paper died a violent death. M. Auguste Vacquerie and his five assistants were imprisoned. After twenty years of voluntary exile and compulsory silence, in 1869, M. Vacquerie founded Le Rappel with M. Paul Meurice, his co-disciple, collaborator, and friend. Since then he has been confined every day of his life from two o'clock in the afternoon until one o'clock in the morning, in his office in the Rue de Valois, inhaling the odour of wet paper and greasy ink so dear to the humanists of the Renaissance, and which Erasmus preferred to the perfume of roses and jasmine. He loves it: he loves the bales of paper, the compositor's case, the inkrollers, and the presses which as they revolve make the walls of the old houses tremble. For, with Rabelais, he firmly believes that printing was invented "by divine suggestion" and for men's happiness. At the office of Le Rappel he is a hundredeyed master. He sees everything, and the hand

that wrote the leading article does not disdain to correct miscellaneous news. M. Auguste Vacquerie, who devotes himself whole-heartedly to all his enterprises, has the trick of endowing his innumerable articles with the accent, the style, the stamp of his mind. They possess a precious and brilliant finish; the style is precise, exact, and symmetrical. I do not here refer to the doctrine, about which there is much to say. I wish to put aside all question of politics, and consider only the philosophy; for Mr. Vacquerie has one. He is above all things logical. Like the devil, he is a great logician, and when he is in the wrong he argues best. The printed characters, to which in his new poem he attributes marvellous virtues, are for him little lead soldiers which he manœuvres with the exactitude that the Emperor employed in moving his grenadiers. The lines of his copy have the martial precision of Caran d'Ache's silhouettes. Battles are not won without stratagems. M. Auguste Vacquerie is familiar with all the tricks of war to which it is possible to resort in the battles of the mind. He is well aware that the good ordering of arguments supplements their number and quality. He is a great strategist of phrases. Following the example of Napoleon and Franconi, he fears not to mislead as to the number of his effectives, by making the same troops pass over the ground several times. But let us hasten to add that it is not by his innocent astuteness or his peculiar subtlety that M. Auguste Vacquerie has achieved, and maintained, his place in the front ranks of journalism.

If M. Vacquerie is a quibbler and wrangler, he argues, like old Corneille, his countryman, in a proud and lofty fashion, with the obstinacy of a