Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/74

58 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES oblique means, would, at least, revolutionise hell or make it a republic. Wherefore our friend can con- clude convincingly : " You see now what has made the devil hesitate, even to this hour, to carry him off." This historical judgment of a really bright intelligence on contemporary matters which he had unusually good opportunities of judging, gives us some idea of the value of judgments contemporary and posterior of intelligences usually anything but bright; the which judgments, elaborated in schools which know nothing at all practically of the subjects in question, are imposed upon us, the unread, and generally accepted by us, as that sublime thing, " the verdict of history." But Saint-Amant had personal reasons for discontent with England as he found it, and as it found him. He tells us, in a stanza really admirable for rhythmic power and energy : " I lose all in England — hair, clothes, and liberty ; I lose here my time and my health, which is worth all the gold of the 'earth ; I lose here my heart, stolen by a beautiful eye, beyond hope of recovery ; and I believe, God not aiding, that at last I shall lose here all my wits." These are broad general charges, but he has emphasised one of them in another poem. Having on a certain occasion drunk freely, with the noble trust in Providence of a Hafiz or a Burns, he was overcome with sleep, and while he slept some mis- creant robbed him. He lifts up his voice : — " Gods, who look on while they rob me asleep, In which of you now can men have any faith, Now that Bacchus has betrayed Saint-Amant ? " What a nobly pathetic indignation ! Bacchus has