Les sires d’autrefois portaient: _Fascé de vair et de gueules._ Pour supports: _deux lions d’or_. Au cimier: _un lion issu du même_. — Or voici que, premier, notre gai souverain, missire le soleil, porte un écu vivant! “_Sur champ de vert gazon_, Paul Fort couché près d’une amoureuse Suzon mêle distraitement cent douze violettes à sa barbe, et Suzon rêve sous sa voilette.” There you have the “familiar style” over which so many gallons of ink have been shed. Observe how perfectly naturally the author speaks of “Paul Fort”; can you hear Tennyson doing it, or Keats or Francis Thompson or the disciples of Brunetière? One might make a pleasant little literary sketch on poets who possess the familiar style to the extent of using their own names in their verse. Thus, that admirable man, Browning: And Robert Browning, you writer of plays, Here’s a subject made to your hand. And old Walt: I, Walt Whitman, a Cosmos, turbulent, fleshly, sensual, Eating, drinking and breeding. It is, at least, agreeable to find poets who consider themselves as human beings instead of very inflated, somewhat simian demi-gods. Better a thousand times have desperate vulgarity than the New England pose au Longfellow and Emerson, or the still more horrible old England pose au Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley. Heaven preserve me from saying M. Fort is vulgar, but if to hate pomposity and moral pretentiousness be vulgar, then let us be vulgar, as M. Fort is. Better be obscene than a ninny. Those who have not read M. Fort’s work and who suspect from the foregoing quotations that he is really a prose writer impudently palming off his productions as “sweet poesy,” are asked to read the following poem with attention: LA RONDE Si toutes les filles du monde voulaient s’ donner la main, tout autour de la mer elles pourraient faire une ronde. Si tous les gars du monde voulaient bien êtr’ marins, ils f’raient avec leurs barques un joli pont sur l’onde. Alors on pourrait faire une ronde autour du monde, si tous les gens du monde voulaient s’ donner la main.