His last poems were written in a very fine hand on some narrow strips of paper that had escaped the vigilance of his jailers, and were smuggled out of prison with the linen that went to the wash. On the flimsy pretext of a conspiracy among the prisoners, Andre Chenier, then only thirty-one, was condemned with twenty-five others as "an enemy of the people, and for having shared in all the crimes perpetrated by the tyrant, his wife, and his family; of writing against liberty and in favor of tyranny; of corresponding with enemies of the republic abroad and at home; and finally of conspiring, in the prison of St. Lazare, to murder the members of the committees of general safety, etc., and to re-establish royalty in France." The twenty-five victims went through the mockery of their trial in the morning of the 25th of July, 1794, and at six the same evening were executed at the Barriere de Vincennes. Three days afterward, Robespierre and many of his accomplices perished upon the scaffold, and the Reign of Terror was at an end. Very little of Andre Chenier's poetry was left in a state fit for publication; he began so many vast enterprises of which he left but the merest fragments, and he wrote so much that his literary executors feared would shock the public taste. His brother published 'The Young Captive' and one or two other poems some seven years after his death, which were quoted by Chateaubriand in 1802 and warmly admired by him. The first complete edition of his poems did not appear till 1819, a year before Lamartine's 'Meditations' came out, and three years before Victor Hugo's first collection was printed. He was not considered a great poet by his first readers, and he would be almost a forgotten one now, were it not for the romance of his short life and his early death. He was the precursor of Byron and De Musset, having the ardent love of liberty of the former and the sensuous grace of the latter; but he lacked the strength for a sustained flight, and he did not know the measure of his powers. He had saturated himself too completely with the honey of Greek verse, and was prisoned in its cloying sweetness. When he would soar into the empyrean, his wings were clogged, and he soon fell back again among the flowers. But he will always be a notable figure in French literature, although we may not consider him, with his French admirers, as one of the masters among the poets of our own time. [Signature: Katharine Hillard] THE YOUNG CAPTIVE "The corn in peace fills out its golden ear; Through the long summer days, the flowers without a fear Drink in the strength of noon. And I, a flower like them, as young, as fair, as pure, Though at the present hour some trouble I endure, I would not die so soon!