of this picturesque and luckless Romantic, a portrait blistered here and there, obliterated in patches, but not without vitality. * * * * * Louis-Jacques-Napoleon Bertrand, who took the name of Ludovic and later preferred that of Aloysius, was born on April 20, 1807, at Céva, in Piedmont. Hugo was born in 1802, and Gautier in 1811. He was a child of that old grey-haired army of which Musset speaks in the _Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_. His mother was an Italian, his father a Frenchman of Lorraine, an old soldier described by his son, in a fiery letter to a newspaper which had insulted him, as “only a patriot of 1789, only an officer of fortune, who at eighteen rushed to pour out his blood on the banks of the Rhine, and, at fifty, counted thirty years of service, nine campaigns, and six wounds.” At the age of seven the young Bertrand was brought to France. He grew up at Dijon, learned in youth of the great things that were being done in Paris, and read Hugo, Nodier, Hoffmann, and Scott, all of whom helped him to turn the modern Dijon into a mediæval city of dreams. Early in 1828, a few young men of Dijon founded a newspaper, _Le Provincial_, to be a mouthpiece for their enlightened generation. It endured for a few months, and Bertrand contributed prose and verse to it, including a first draft of a prose poem that, in a much altered form, was printed in _Gaspard de la Nuit_. The paper was not unnoticed in Paris, and when it died and Bertrand left Dijon for the capital, he found some doors already open to him. He was twenty-one, penniless, with rolls of manuscript in his pocket, and a shy eagerness to read aloud from them. Two portraits of him remain, one by Sainte-Beuve and the other by Victor Pavie. Sainte-Beuve describes him as “... a tall, thin young man of twenty-one, with a yellow and brown complexion, very lively little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp without doubt, rather wretched perhaps, and a long, silent laugh. He seemed timid, or rather uncivilised....” Victor Pavie says: “His awkward walk, his incorrect and unsophisticated costume, his lack of balance and of aplomb, betrayed that he had newly escaped from the provinces. One divined the poet in the ill-restrained fire of his timid and wandering eyes. As for the expression of his face, a lofty taste for beauty was combined in it with a somewhat uncivilised taciturnity....”