rather to amiability, and to his association with men eminent in different ways, such as Rivarol and Joubert, than to any real power. He has been regarded as a precursor of Lamartine; but the resemblance is chiefly on Lamartine's weakest side; and the stress laid on him recently, as on Lamartine himself and even on Chenier, is part of a passing reaction against the school of Hugo. Even more ambitiously, Luce de Lancival, Campenon, Dumesnil and Parseval de Grand-Maison endeavoured to write epics, and succeeded rather worse than the Chapelains and Desmarets of the 17th century. The characteristic of all this poetry was the description of everything in metaphor and paraphrase, and the careful avoidance of anything like directness of expression; and the historians of the Romantic movement have collected many instances of this absurdity. Lamartine will be more properly noticed in the next division. But about the same time as Lamartine, and towards the end of the present period, there appeared a poet who may be regarded as the last important echo of Malherbe. This was Casimir Delavigne (1793-1843), the author of _Les Messeniennes_, a writer of very great talent, and, according to the measure of J. B. Rousseau and Lebrun, no mean poet. It is usual to reckon Delavigne as transitionary between the two schools, but in strictness he must be counted with the classicists. Dramatic poetry exhibited somewhat similar characteristics. The system of tragedy writing had become purely mechanical, and every act, almost every scene and situation, had its regular and appropriate business and language, the former of which the poet was not supposed to alter at all, and the latter only very slightly. Poinsinet, La Harpe, M. J. Chenier, Raynouard, de Jouy, Briffaut, Baour-Lormian, all wrote in this style. Of these Chenier (1764-1811) had some of the vigour of his brother Andre, from whom he was distinguished by more popular political principles and better fortune. On the other hand, Jean Francois Ducis (1733-1816), who passes with Englishmen as a feeble reducer of Shakespeare to classical rules, passed with his contemporaries as an introducer into French poetry of strange and revolutionary novelties. Comedy, on the other hand, fared better, as indeed it had always fared. Fabre d'Eglantine (1755-1794) (the companion in death of Danton), Collin d'Harleville (1755-1806), Francois G. J. S. Andrieux (1759-1833), Picard, Alexandre Duval, and Nepomucene Lemercier (1771-1840) (the most vigorous of all as a poet and a critic of mark) were the comic authors of the period, and their works have not suffered the complete eclipse of the contemporary tragedies which in part they also wrote. If not exactly worthy successors of Moliere, they are at any rate not unworthy children of Beaumarchais. In romance writing there is again, until we come to Madame de Stael, a great want of originality and even of excellence in workmanship. The works of Madame de Genlis (1746-1830) exhibit the