his friend; this was the Italian poet Alfieri, who had just arrived in Paris accompanied by the Duchess of Albany. And almost at the same time he became acquainted with the woman who is extolled and bitterly accused in many of his poems under the name of Camille--Madame de Bonneuil, the love of his youth, to whom he was long and passionately attached. Often in her country home did young André kneel at this lady's feet whilst she played the harp and sang one of the fashionable romances recounting the pains and joys of love. In 1787 he was appointed attaché to the embassy in London, where he felt miserably lonely and dependent. Electrified by the news of the outbreak of the Revolution, he returned, full of hope, to Paris. Ere this he had become conscious of his poetic gifts; he now began to plan and write poetic works, varying very much in character, but all severely antique in style. Twice before had French literature returned to the antique. The first time was in the days of Ronsard, when men decked antiquity with the gaudy tinsel of the Italian Renaissance; the second was in the days of Louis XIV., when they invested it with court pomp and conventions. André Chénier, who had Greek blood in his veins, who read and wrote his mother's tongue as easily as French, and who perhaps alone among Frenchmen saw ancient Hellas neither through Latin spectacles nor through the dust of seventeenth-century perruques, André Chénier calmly and simply, like a young Apollo, put an end to the existing conception of the antique, and, consequently, of the nature of poetry. He realised that the poets of Greece had spoken and written in the language of the people, and that their perfection of form, the result of self-restraint, was something widely different from reverence for arbitrary, conventional directions and prohibitions. He represents a reaction against the eighteenth-century poetic style which resembles Thorvaldsen's reaction against eighteenth-century sculpture; like Thorvaldsen, he frequently imitated and made use of the antique; he surpasses the Dane in ardour, sensuous warmth, and pathos.