"Unfortunately, the works of M. Chénier, though they show the germ of a remarkable talent, glow with neither that antique simplicity nor that sublime majesty. The author was distinguished for an eminently classical mind. None better understood the principles of ancient and modern literature; the stage, eloquence, history, criticism, satire: he embraced all these; but his writings bear the impress of the disastrous days that witnessed his birth. Too often dictated by the spirit of party, they have been applauded by factions. Shall I, in discussing my predecessor's works, separate what has already passed away, like our discords, and what will perhaps survive, like our glory? Here we find the interests of society and the interests of literature confounded. I cannot forget the first sufficiently to occupy myself solely with the second; wherefore, gentlemen, I am obliged either to keep silence or to raise political questions. "There are persons who would make of literature an abstract thing and isolate it in the midst of human affairs. Such persons will say to me, 'Why keep silence? Treat M. Chénier's works only from the literary point of view.' That is to say, gentlemen, that I must abuse your patience and my own by repeating commonplaces which you can find anywhere and which you know better than I. Manners change with the times: heirs to a long series of peaceful years, our forerunners were able to indulge in purely academic discussions which were even less a proof of their talent than of their happiness. But we, who remain the victims of a great shipwreck, no longer have what is needed to relish so perfect a calm. Our ideas, our minds have taken a different direction. The man has in us taken the place of the academician: by divesting literature of all its futility, we now behold it only in the light of our mighty memories and of the experience of our adversity. What! After a revolution which has caused us, in a few years, to live through the events of many centuries, shall the writer be forbidden all lofty considerations, shall he be denied the right to examine the serious side of objects? Shall he spend a trivial life occupied with grammatical quibbles, rules of taste, petty literary judgments? Shall he grow old, bound in the swaddling-clothes of his cradle? Shall he not show, at the end of his days, a brow furrowed by his long labours, by his grave reflections, and often by those manly sufferings which add to the greatness of mankind? What important cares, then, will have whitened his hair? The miserable sorrows of self-love and the puerile sports of the mind.