Apart from the rustic _Noels_, the eighteenth century produced little French Christmas poetry of any charm. Some of the carols most sung in French churches to-day belong, however, to this period, _e.g._, the "Venez, divin Messie" of the Abbe Pellegrin.{13} * * * * * One cannot leave the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without some mention of its Latin hymnody. From a date near 1700, apparently, comes the sweet and solemn "Adeste, fideles"; by its music and its rhythm, perhaps, rather than by its actual words it has become the best beloved of Christmas hymns. The present writer has heard it sung with equal reverence and heartiness in English, German, French, and Italian churches, and no other hymn seems so full of the spirit of Christmas devotion--wonder, |64| awe, and tenderness, and the sense of reconciliation between Heaven and earth. Composed probably in France, "Adeste, fideles" came to be used in English as well as French Roman Catholic churches during the eighteenth century. In 1797 it was sung at the chapel of the Portuguese Embassy in London; hence no doubt its once common name of "Portuguese hymn." It was first used in an Anglican church in 1841, when the Tractarian Oakley translated it for his congregation at Margaret Street Chapel, London. Another fine Latin hymn of the eighteenth-century French Church is Charles Coffin's "Jam desinant suspiria."{14} It appeared in the Parisian Breviary in 1736, and is well known in English as "God from on high hath heard." * * * * * The Revolution and the decay of Catholicism in France seem to have killed the production of popular carols. The later nineteenth century, however, saw a revival of interest in the _Noel_ as a literary form. In 1875 the bicentenary of Saboly's death was celebrated by a competition for a _Noel_ in the Provencal tongue, and something of the same kind has been done in Brittany.{15} The _Noel_ has attracted by its aesthetic charm even poets who are anything but devout; Theophile Gautier, for instance, wrote a graceful Christmas carol, "Le ciel est noir, la terre est blanche."