X. To M. Chapelain

Monsieur,--You were a popular writer, and an honourable, over-educated,
upright gentleman. Of the latter character you can never be deprived, and I
doubt not it stands you in better stead where you are, than the laurels which
flourished so gaily, and faded so soon.


Laurel is green for a season, and Love is fair for a day,
But Love grows bitter with treason, and laurel out-lives not May.

I know not if Mr. Swinburne is cor-rect in his botany, but _your_ laurel
certainly outlived not May, nor can we hope that you dwell where Orpheus and
where Homer are. Some other crown, some other Paradise, we cannot doubt it,
awaited _un_si_bon_homme_. But the moral excellence that even Boileau
admitted, _la_foi,_l'honneur,_la probiite',_ do not in Parnassus avail the
popular poet, an4 some luckless Musset or The'ophile, Regnier or Villars
attains a kind of immortality denied to the man of many contemporary editions,
and of a great commercial success.

If ever, for the confusion of Horace, any Poet was Made, you, Sir, should have
been that fortunately manufactured article. You were, in matters of the Muses,
the child of many prayers. Never, since Adam's day, have any parents but yours
prayed for a poet-child. Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in
general, and fathers in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M.
Chapelain and Jeanne Corbie're his wife with the future author of 'La
Pucelle.' Oh futile hopes of men, _0_pectora_caeca!_ All was done that
education could do for a genius which, among other qualities, 'especially
lacked fire and imagination,' and an ear for verse--sad defects these in a
child of the Muses. Your training in all the mechanics and metaphysics of
criticism might have made you exclaim, like Rasselas, 'Enough! Thou hast
convinced me that no human being can ever be a Poet.' Unhappily, you succeeded
in convincing Cardinal Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your
powers, you received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain
of the Cardinal's minstrels, as M. de Tre'ville was Captain of the King's
Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were more richly
endowed than ever is Research, even Research in Prehistoric English, among us
niggard moderns! How I wish I knew a Cardinal, or, even as you did, a Prime
Minister, who would praise and pension me; but Envy be still! Your existence
was more happy indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at
the Ho'tel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and fair,
and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your yet unpublished
Epic. 'Who, indeed,' says a sympathetic author, M. The'ophile Gautier, 'who
could expect less than a miracle from a man so deeply