Lamartine in his lyric work suffered considerably from the disease of the time--over-emphasis. He ranked as a philosopher in his day--much the sort of philosopher which Maeterlinck pretends to be to-day. He had a goodly share of the didactic in his makeup, as Hugo never had (except toward the end of his life, when didacticism became the fashion). As a result we can hardly place Lamartine any higher than Hugo as a lyric poet. But his ardent religious sense, combined with his fine power over eloquent language, made him greatly loved in his day and as a result his texts enter largely into the song literature of the time. Béranger had much more of the true lyric in him. His language was simple, his message popular. He was always more at home in the streets than in the drawing room. In some ways he might be called the Kipling of his time. He appealed to the French sense of national pride, dwelling upon the glorious history of the past and the nobility of the French character with all the paraphernalia of the jingo poet. In particular he resuscitated, or rather created, the Napoleonic myth. The age in which he wrote was a new one, containing few of the immediate conditions of Napoleon’s time. A new generation had sprung up, a generation which had not experienced the heartaches and miseries of the Napoleonic wars, or else had forgotten them, and thought of the time only as the age in which France single-handed had defeated the whole of Europe. Napoleon was no longer the epileptic and egomaniac who had shattered the fine ideals of the French Revolution and for his own ambition brought France almost to the verge of ruin. He was now _le petit caporal_ who had fought with his men on the bridge at Arcola, had eaten the same food and slept on the same hard ground with his army. The myth was tremendously attractive, and made it possible some twenty years later for a shallow adventurer to become Emperor of France (merely because he happened to be the nephew of the great Bonaparte) and bring France once more to the verge of ruin to please personal and dynastic ambition. In the creation of this myth Béranger’s sense of the picturesque and popular served him well. As a lyric poet, apart from the peculiar nature of his subject matter, he would hardly be remembered. The most genuine and most refined of the literary men of the time was Musset, for many years the lover of Georges Sand and Chopin’s successor in her affections. His work partook far less of the spectacular than that of his contemporaries. He was interested in interpreting the human soul and he did his work with the most delicate literary art. His inspiration was fresh and creative; his workmanship was finished to the last degree. It is a great pity that he had no Schubert to set his poems to music. A musician of the stature of Musset might have created a distinctive and great French song literature fifty years earlier than it came. I