If even the gay, the cordial Roumanille gave out at the last this savour of antique philosophy, the likeness of Mistral to the elder poets is far more striking. He is the Provençal Theocritus, and his poems, with their delightful literalness of touch, their unforced picturesqueness and natural simplicity, will probably endure when more striking monuments of our nineteenth-century literature are less read than remembered. We cannot imagine, at any distance of time, a Provence in which some posy of Mistral’s verses will not be treasured. He will be to the great province what Joachim du Bellay has been to Anjou. True, he has written too much, but posterity is an excellent editor, and reduces the most voluminous among us to a compendious handful. Mistral is the greatest of the Félibres, and perhaps the only one whose works will survive the charming _Davidsbund_ of poets and patriots which so loudly fills the public ear to-day. We went more than once to see the great man in his garden at Maillane, a pleasant place surrounding a cool, quiet villa, where the poet lives with his young wife. It is the only house of any pretensions in Maillane, and to the good people of the commune Monsieur Mistral is both the poet and the squire. He comes out to receive you--a strikingly handsome man with a beautiful voice; so much like the once-famous Buffalo Bill in his appearance that one day, when the two celebrities met by accident in a Parisian café, they stared at each other, bewildered for one moment, and then, rising, each advanced towards the other and shook hands! We talked of many things, and among others, of course, of Félibrige. I ventured to ask him the meaning of the name, which is a puzzle not to philologists alone. He confessed that it had no particular meaning; that on that day in May, in 1854, when he and Roumanille and the other five discussed their projected Provençal renaissance, one of them reminded the others of a quaint old song, still sung in out-of-the-way Provençal villages: a canticle in honour of certain prophets or wise men dimly spoken of as “Les félibres de la Loi.” No one knew precisely what the word designed--so much the greater its charm, its suggestiveness! The name was adopted by acclamation; and henceforth, at any rate, the meaning of Félibre is clear. VI