_18th-Century Poetry._--The dispiriting signs shown during the 17th century by French poetry proper received entire fulfilment in the following age. The two poets who were most prominent at the opening of the period were the abbe de Chaulieu (1639-1720) and the marquis de la Fare (1644-1712), poetical or rather versifying twins who are always quoted together. They were both men who lived to a great age, yet their characteristics are rather those of their later than of their earlier contemporaries. They derive on the one hand from the somewhat trifling school of Voiture, on the other from the Bacchic sect of Saint-Amant; and they succeed in uniting the inferior qualities of both with the cramped and impoverished though elegant style of which Fenelon had complained. Their compositions are as a rule lyrical, as lyrical poetry was understood after the days of Malherbe--that is to say, quatrains of the kind ridiculed by Moliere, and Pindaric odes, which have been justly described as made up of alexandrines after the manner of Boileau cut up into shorter or longer lengths. They were followed, however, by the one poet who succeeded in producing something resembling poetry in this artificial style, J. B. Rousseau (1671-1741). Rousseau, who in some respects was nothing so little as a religious poet, was nevertheless strongly influenced, as Marot had been, by the Psalms of David. His _Odes_ and his _Cantates_ are perhaps less destitute of that spirit than the work of any other poet of the century excepting Andre Chenier. Rousseau was also an extremely successful epigrammatist, having in this respect, too, resemblances to Marot. Le Franc de Pompignan (1700-1784), to whom Voltaire's well-known sarcasms are not altogether just, and Louis Racine (1692-1763), who wrote pious and altogether forgotten poems, belonged to the same poetical school; though both the style and matter of Racine are strongly tinctured by his Port Royalist sympathies and education. Lighter verse was represented in the 18th century by the long-lived Saint-Aulaire (1643-1742), by Gentil Bernard (1710-1775), by the abbe (afterwards cardinal) de Bernis (1715-1794), by Claude Joseph Dorat (1734-1780), by Antoine Bertin (1752-1790) and by Evariste de Parny (1753-1814), the last the most vigorous, but all somewhat deserving the term applied to Dorat of _ver luisant du Parnasse_. The jovial traditions of Saint-Amant begat a similar school of anacreontic songsters, which, represented in turn by Charles Francois Panard (1674-1765), Charles Colle (1709-1783), Armand Gouffe (1775-1845), and Marc-Antoine-Madeleine Desaugiers (1772-1827), led directly to the best of all such writers, Beranger. To this class Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836) perhaps also belongs; though his most famous composition, the _Marseillaise_, is of a different stamp. Nor is the account of the light verse of the 18th century complete without reference to a long succession of fable writers, who, in an unbroken chain, connect La