The two former have already passed away, leaving behind them many charming lyrics, but no work of universal and lasting interest. Mistral is gloriously young at sixty, able, and let us hope willing, to give us in that rich and flowing idiom, which no one else has ever managed with such mastery as he, many more historical and narrative poems, vivid with local colour, and teeming with local tradition, like “Calendau”--a romance of the last century, which appeared in 1873 and “Nerto”--a tale of the time of the Popes at Avignon, published in 1884. But it is safe to prophesy that neither Mistral nor any other _felibre_ will ever give us another “Mirèio”--so spontaneous, artless, and impassioned, so dewy with the memories of the poet’s own childhood on a Provençal farm, or _mas_, so gay with the laughter and moving with the tears of simple folk, reflecting in so flawless a mirror every change of the seasons, every aspect of the free, primitive, bucolic life of the Mediterranean shore. The success of Aubanel was perhaps frustrated by the very extravagance of his own aims. When we find him at the _fêtes_ of Forcalquier in 1875 apostrophizing the arbiters of literary renown in France in terms like these: “Sachez que nous sommes un grand peuple, et qu’il n’est plus temps de nous mépriser. Trente départements parlent notre langue, d’une mer à l’autre mer, des Pyrénées jusqu’aux Alpes, de Crau à Limousin; le même amour fait battre notre poitrine, l’amour de la terre natale et de la langue maternelle.... Sachez que vous serez tombés longtemps alors que le Provençal, toujours jeune, parlera encore de vous avec pitié”--we can then understand that Saint-René Tallandier, the original sponsor of Mirèio, should have made haste to express his grave apprehensions for the sanity of the revivalist movement, and to repudiate in the name of the great Review all countenance of so vast a pretension on behalf of an “idiom which had vanished for six hundred years from the battlefield of ideas.” One is reminded of the lament of the late William Barnes that the dialect of Dorset had not prevailed in England over the tongue of Shakespeare. Yet William Barnes, like the _felibre_, wrote poems in the local _patois_, far more beautiful and pathetic than any which he ever produced in proper English.