protected by government, to the end that idealism may not perish from the earth. M. Thiers who was prime minister at that time is said to have received a number of letters from young poets, the general tenor of which was: “A position or I’ll kill myself.”[251] A circumstance that should interest Americans is that Poe as interpreted by Baudelaire came to hold for a later generation of romanticists the place that Chatterton had held for the romanticists of 1830. Poe was actually murdered, says Baudelaire--and there is an element of truth in the assertion along with much exaggeration--by this great gas-lighted barbarity (i.e., America). All his inner and spiritual life whether drunkard’s or poet’s, was one constant effort to escape from this antipathetic atmosphere “in which,” Baudelaire goes on to say, “the impious love of liberty has given birth to a new tyranny, the tyranny of the beasts, a zoöcracy”; and in this human zoo a being with such a superhuman fineness of sensibility as Poe was of course at a hopeless disadvantage. In general our elation at Poe’s recognition in Europe should be tempered by the reflection that this recognition is usually taken as a point of departure for insulting America. Poe is about the only hyperæsthetic romanticist we have had, and he therefore fell in with the main European tendency that comes down from the eighteenth century. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, whom I have already cited as an extreme example of romantic idealism, was one of Poe’s avowed followers; but Villiers is also related by his æsthetic and “diabolic” Catholicism to Chateaubriand; and the religiosity of Chateaubriand itself derives from the religiosity of Rousseau.