Very early in life the young Parisian--he was born in Paris, January 12, 1842--began to write verses which showed marks of distinction, and he was only twenty-four when _Le Reliquaire_, his first poetic volume, appeared. Two years later, _Poèmes Modernes_ and _La Grève des Forgerons_ were issued, establishing his place among modern poets of his land. And when, in 1869, at the age of twenty-seven, he produced _Le Passant_, a group of exquisite comedies in verse, he became a celebrity. It was inevitable that a literary dweller in the French capital, reared among the traditions of a stage whose productions are classic, and a poet who by both nature and environment breathed in the air of art, should turn to the drama after having won to the forefront in lyric and narrative expression. Successively he produced _Deux Douleurs_, _Fais ce que dois_, _Les Bijoux de la Délivrance_, _Madame de Maintenon_, and _Le Luthier de Crémorne_--the last-named an especially pleasing drama, full of that human feeling which marks Coppée in all his writings. Four volumes contain his dramatic work, all of it good, much of it brilliant. As a novelist, Coppée left no mark upon his times--he was so easily surpassed in this field by his contemporaries. But as a writer of little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant group which includes those immortals of the short-story--Maupassant, Daudet, Mérimée, Balzac, Gautier, Loti, Halévy, Theuriet, and France. From the work of all these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished. The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and by that same token an infinitely harder one. Daudet, child of Provence though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire. Balzac chose his “cases” from classes high and low, but rarely failed to uncover with his sharp scalpel some malignant social growth. Gautier was rougher, coarser, and less sympathetic, though at times we may discern in him the sudden swelling tear and tremulous lip which now and again reveal the tenderness latent in brusk men. Halévy was more idyllic and pastoral. Mérimée of all this wonderful company--to whose society other notables also come with insistent and well-sustained claims for admission--was the nearest to Coppée in the type of his work. Both knew intimately and with tender feeling the life of lowly folk--Coppée finding ever in his Paris the themes, the scenes, the types for his stories, while Mérimée’s pen was never so magic as when the romantic Corsican airs breathed about his brow. Both these master craftsmen produced a prose infused with the imagery, grace, and charm of poesy; both were masters of a style nervous, firm, condensed, and vivid.