I know not if Mr. Swinburne is correct in his botany, but your laurel certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus and where Homer are.  Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it, awaited un si bon homme.  But the moral excellence that even Boileau admitted, ladfoi, l’honneur, la probiite’, do not in Parnassus avail the popular poet, and some luckless Musset or The’ophile, Regnier or Villars attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many contemporary editions, and of a great commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should have been that fortunately manufactured article.  You were, in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers.  Never, since Adam’s day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child.  Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and Jeanne Corbie’re his wife with the future author of ’La Pucelle.’  Oh futile hopes of men, O pectora caeca! All was done that education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, ’especially lacked fire and imagination,’ and an ear for verse—­sad defects these in a child of the Muses.  Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like Rasselas, ’Enough!  Thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet.’  Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of the Cardinal’s minstrels, as M. de Tre’ville was Captain of the King’s Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric English, among us niggard moderns!  How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or, even as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise and pension me; but Envy be still!  Your existence was more happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the Ho’tel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished Epic.  ‘Who, indeed,’ says a sympathetic author, M. The’ophile Gautier, ’who could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply learned in the laws of art—­a perfect Turk in the science of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the great?’ Bishops and politicians combined in perfect good faith to advertise your merits.  Hard must have been the heart that could resist the testimonials of your skill as a poet offered by the Duc de Montausier, and the learned Huet, Bishop of Avranches, and Monseigneur Godeau, Bishop of Vence, or M. Colbert, who had such a genius for finance.

If bishops and politicians and prime ministers skilled in finance, and some critics, Me’nage and Sarrazin and Vaugetas, if ladies of birth and taste, if all the world in fact, combined to tell you that you were a great poet, how can we blame you for taking yourself seriously, and appraising yourself at the public estimate?