Raphaelesque beauty which Byron's neither attains nor aims at. He is the weaker, tenderer, more charming, French Byron, as Heine is the smaller, more wanton, wittier, German Byron, and Paludan-Müller the satirical, orthodox, royalist, Danish Byron. De Musset suffers like a boy, complains like a woman; he is what Auguste Préault, the sculptor, once called him: "Mademoiselle Byron." Shelley, whose name did not find its way into France till much later, was practically unknown to this generation. As for the so-called Lake Poets, Sainte-Beuve, who acquired the English language in his youth, and had more of the critical gift than any of his contemporaries, was the only one of the Romanticists who appreciated that nature-loving, realistic school at its true worth, assimilated some of its spirit, and endeavoured by means of a few translations to bring it into favour. Brizeux, the poet of Brittany, reminds us of the Lake Poets, though he knew nothing about them. The influence of Germany was less powerful than that of England, and it is still easier in the case of this country to show the free treatment to which the impressions received were subjected. Germany was seen overshadowed by the old Teutonic oaks; its fountains and rivers were haunted by elves and fairies, who trailed their shadowy white garments across the dewy grass; among its mountains dwelt the gnomes, and in the air above the mountain-peaks witches held their revelries. Germany was a Walpurgis Night dreamland. Only one of Goethe's works was really popular, namely, _Werther_, the high pressure passion of which enchanted all readers. Werther seemed to them a René, because, though he was much older than René, they had made acquaintance with René first, and this circumstance deprived the German hero of his freshness and approximated him to the Childe Harold type. Something of the same kind happened with Faust. That imposing figure, which made such an impression on the whole of Europe, was so completely foreign to the French that they never truly comprehended it. French poetry had never occupied itself with the struggles and sufferings of the questioning spirit. And this German doctor, who is simple enough to see the devil in a poodle dog, sentimental enough to cross Gretchen's threshold with pious emotions in his breast, and yet unscrupulous enough to desert the girl he has betrayed and kill her brother in a dishonourable duel, was too un-French to be understood. We gather from the apologies of the Romanticists the nature of the criticism to which the men of the classic school subjected _Faust_. "How many," writes Duvergier de Hauranne, "are rendered insensible to all the beauties of this masterpiece by the fact that it treats of a compact with the devil! They cannot understand any one allowing such an improbability to pass unchallenged; and yet they themselves from their childhood have, without raising the slightest objection, beheld Agamemnon murdering