it took him three years to complete his task, and when he delivered his work to the President, a second wife was already consoling the poor widower for his loss. Malherbe with great gravity asks, if he would like to have his wife back again. The poem consists only of nine stanzas, of six lines each.

Malherbe died in the year 1628.

THE EARLY FRENCH POETS.

CLEMENT MAROT.

In the course of this last summer, I happened to reside for some weeks in a place where I had free access to a large collection of books,* which formerly belonged to the kings of France; but, like other royal property, having been confiscated at the Revolution, still continues unreclaimed, and is now open to the use of the public. Of this occasion I gladly availed myself, to extend my acquaintance with some of their earlier writers, whose works are not commonly to be met with in our own country; and amongst these, fixed my attention principally on such of their poets as were of most note at the restoration, or more properly speaking, the general diffusion of polite learning in Europe. What the result of this inquiry has been, I invite my readers to judge.

The French of the present day, I know, set but little store on these revivers of the poetical art.

* At Versailles, where the Author spent the summer of 1821.-ED.

B

Their extreme solicitude for what they call the purity of their language, makes them easily offended by phrases, the irregularities of which we should be ready to pardon, in consideration of higher excellence, or even to welcome, as so many means of aiding us in that escape from the tameness of common every-day life, which it is one great end of poetry to effect. I do not know of any other people who have set up an exclusive standard of this sort. What would the Greeks of the age of Pericles have said to a literary censor, that should have endeavoured to persuade them to throw aside the works of Homer and Hesiod, because he could have pointed out to them in every page, modes of expression that would not have passed muster in a coterie at Aspasia's? What reply should we make to a critic, that would fain put us out of conceit with some of the finest things in Spenser and Shakspeare, because they were cast in a mould utterly differing from that impressed on the language of our politer circles, though similar enough to the stamp of our countryfolks' talk? Let any one take up Voltaire's commentary on the tragedies of Corneille, and he will see to what a pitch this fastidiousness has been carried in the instance of a writer comparatively modern. I am not much afraid lest the generality of my readers should be subject to any such disgust. Our ignorance is a happy security from this danger; though I trust it will not prevent us from being alive to the

many beauties that will meet us in the search we are about to engage in.

"We

We will begin with Marot; not because his works are of very rare occurrence, (for there have been many editions of them,) but because, though frequently spoken of, and even recommended as a model of elegant "badinage" by Boileau, he is but little known amongst us; which indeed is not much to be wondered at, when his own countrymen seem to have almost lost sight of him. "Marot is much talked of, but seldom read," says one of their critics.* do not read with pleasure that which has need of a dictionary to explain it. Almost all his expressions are antiquated."-"Villon and Marot, and some others, are satirical poets; and their epigrams may be said to be the only titles they have to celebrity in the present day," says another. All this may show the little taste the French now have for their elder poets. How otherwise could they have overlooked those exquisite sketches, the Temple of Cupid, and the Eclogue of Pan and Robin, by Marot; the latter of

* M. Dussault, in a review of a selection of Marot's Works, inserted in his Annales Littéraires, t. i. p. 198.

+ M. Avenel, one of the writers in the Lycée Français, t. ii. p. 106, an entertaining miscellany that lasted but a short time after the decease of Charles Loyson, a young poet of considerable promise, who was a chief contributor to it. He died in the course of last year.

which is worthy the author of the Faerie Queene,* as the former is of Chaucer?

We might almost suppose ourselves to be reading an imitation of the proem to the Canterbury Tales, in the following verses with which the Temple of Cupid

opens :

Sur le printemps que la belle Flora

Les champs couverts de diverse fleur a,

E son amy Zephyrus les esvente,

Quand doucement en l'air souspire e vente.

The whole poem is indeed so fanciful, and so replete with a peculiar kind of sprightly humour, that I am not without hopes of amusing my readers by an abstract of it.

In this merry spring-tide, the God commands that his eyes may be unbandaged, and looking round his celestial throne, sees all nations bending under his sway, like a scion under the wind; and the other deities themselves, submitting to his power. But observing that Marot continued still refractory, he resolves to tame the rebel; and taking an arrow out of his quiver, executes his purpose so effectually, as to render the unhappy poet an object of commiseration to all who have a heart capable of pity. In order to assuage his sufferings, Marot resolves on a far-off journey in search of the goddess Ferme-amour,

* Indeed he has closely copied it in the Shepheard's Kalendar, Ecl. 12.