M. de Chenier, who watched over his family from afar, was ambitious for the future of his sons; Constantine, the eldest, was already in the diplomatic service; the other three were destined for the army. Andre joined his regiment when he was twenty, and went to Strasbourg to learn his new duties; but the life of a soldier was not congenial to him, and although he made one or two dear friends in the garrison, the six months that he spent there seemed interminable, and he returned to Paris to resume his life of elegant dissipation among his rich and titled acquaintances. But his health began to give way, and the hope of relief from a change of climate induced him to join his old friends, the brothers Louis and Charles Trudaine, in a journey they projected through Switzerland and Italy to Constantinople. The three friends started together in the summer of 1784, passed through Switzerland, and spent the autumn and winter in Italy; but although they remained away a year, they never got any further. This journey and its experiences did much to educate and enrich the mind of Andre, and he continued to devote much time to study and poetic composition to the elaboration of vast schemes for dramas and epics, and to the imitation of the Greek and Latin poets he loved and copied so well. He wished to enlarge the province of the idyl, and to give to it more variety than even Theocritus had succeeded in doing; to make it more dramatic, less rustic, and in short if we may judge from the assertions of his countrymen, a more perfect picture of that elegant and aristocratic world in which he moved. The idyls of Andre Chenier are to poetry very much what the pictures of Watteau and Boucher are to painting. The variety he wished so much to impart to them is after all confined to the grouping of the figures, and their greatest beauty is the classic elegance of their style; as one of his French biographers says, "The style of these poems makes up for what the sentiment lacks of ideality, and lends a sort of purity to details which from any other pen would have run great risk of coarseness." Sainte-Beuve speaks of "his boxwood flute, his ivory lute"; but all this beauty of diction, this smoothness and grace of verse, can hardly blind the unprejudiced critic to the fact that "a sort of purity" will hardly make up for his too frequent choice of subjects that appeal only to the grossest tastes. His highest ideals, like those of most poets, were never reached. He had lofty visions of writing a poem called 'Hermes,' which should be an exposition of natural and social laws, principles, and progress; a system of philosophy in heroic couplets, beginning with the birth of humanity and its first questioning of natural phenomena, its first efforts to solve the problems of the universe, and coming down to the latest discoveries of physical and political science. He never succeeded in completing the preliminary studies necessary to the carrying out of