Page 16.
Romance of Nina. Charles Guillaume Etienne was one of Napoleon's followers. The piece we give here has enjoyed a high reputation, but a translation cannot do it justice.
Page 17.
My Vocation. This song was a great favourite of Thackeray's. The reader may perhaps remember his reference to it in his lecture on Goldsmith, and his quotation of the opening lines as peculiarly applicable to that poet:—
'Jeté sur cette boule,
Laid, chétif, et souffrant;
Etouffé dans la foule,
Faute d'êtie assez grand;
Une plainte touchante
De ma bouche sortit;
Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,
Chante, pauvre petit!'
Page 19.
The Memories of the People. In spite of Béranger's coarseness, it is impossible to deny him the title of a true poet—a poet of the people. The piece here given, those entitled, 'Le Vieux Caporal,' 'Jeanne la Rousse,' 'Le Roi d'Yvetôt,' and a hundred others, will always retain their hold on the public mind.
Page 22.
The Captive to the Swallows. This is the well-known song of Béranger named 'Les Hirondelles.'
Page 24.
The Fall of the Leaves. Sainte-Beuve has remarked that there exists or has existed in every man, be he a poet or not, 'a certain flower of sentiment, of vague desire, and of reverie,' which expires and vanishes under 'prosaic labours' and the every-day occupations of life. There exists, he thinks, in all men, or in the vast majority of men, 'a poet who died young while the man himself lives on.' Millevoye, the author of this piece, is in Sainte-Beuve's opinion 'the personified type of the young poet who cannot live but must die in each of us at the age of thirty years more or less.' The criticism is just. Millevoye is a poet of a secondary order. He lived when a great change was coming over French poetry, and he had not courage or genius to leave the old beaten tracks. 'Charles Millevoye,' said his friend Nodier, 'would have made new and successful invasions in the domains of Poesy if he had not made de si bonnes études. But these bonnes études were not the only obstacles, it seems, in his way. He wanted vigour, imagination, originality. He could
