his job Corneille took from his purse three bits of money to pay for his shoe, and when the two gentlemen got home Corneille's friend offered him his purse, but he declined all assistance. Corneille was

of a proud and independent nature. He is reported to have said of himself, "Je suis saoûl de gloire, mais affamé d'argent." He has been accused of avarice-unjustly, we think-because he tried to get as much money as he could for his plays. If a man wants money he will try to obtain that which he think sshould belong to him. And if he wants it badly, his high notions of dignity-if it be only mock dignity-will go to the wall. No fine gentleman nowadays would think it beneath him to take 100 from a publisher or from a theatrical manager after it had been fairly earned. Some ask for their 100 before it has been earned. Two hundred years ago a poet was supposed to be paid with honour and glory, but, unfortunately for himself, Corneille wanted more solid acknowledgment. And two hundred years ago the rights of authorship were not so well understood as now. In France, as in England, very few men could have lived by their pen alone. It is true that the dramatists were among the most fortunate, but many years had elapsed since Corneille's plays had been popular at the theatre. In 1670 Molière, as theatrical manager, had given him 2,000 francs for a piece. This was considered a large sum, and it may be doubted if Molierè's company ever got back their money. The play was Tite et Bérénice, and it was played alternately with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. We may judge which of the two plays we should like to see best. Corneille had to make the most of his 2,000 francs, for his pension, supposed to be paid to him every year from the Civil List, was always delayed. The year was made to have fifteen months! Sometimes the pension was not paid at all. So that poor Corneille was hard pressed for money in the latter years of his life, from 1672 to 1684, while his years of greatest triumph had been from 1636 to 1642. And he had small resources except what had come to him from writing. His two sons went into the army, and he had to provide for them at a time when his payments from the theatre were diminishing. There is no evidence which should make us think he was avaricious or greedy for money.

In his manner Corneille was apt to be awkward and ungainly. A contemporary says that when he first saw him he took him for a tradesman at Rouen. Rouen was his birthplace, and there he lived until his avocations compelled him, against his will, to live in Paris. Like La Fontaine, he made a poor figure in society. He did not talk well. He was not good company, and his friends were bound

to confess that he was rather a bore. Those who knew him well enough would hint to him his defects, at which he would smile, and say, "I am none the less Pierre Corneille." But his physiognomy, when observed, was far from commonplace. His nephew, Fontenelle, says of him: "His face was pleasant enough; a large nose, a good mouth, his expression lively, and his features strongly marked and fit to be transmitted to posterity in a medal or in a bust." Corneille begins a letter to Pellisson with the following verses, describing himself:

En matière d'amour je suis fort inégal,

Je l'écris assez bien, je le fais assez mal;
J'ai la plume féconde et la bouche stérile,
Bon galant au théâtre et fort mauvais en ville;

Et l'on peut rarement m'écouter sans ennui

Que quand je me produis par la bouche d'autrui.

This is a charming little bit of autobiography. And in the same letter, after the verses, the old poet says, "My poetry left me at the same time as my teeth."

All this he writes, laughing in his sleeve. But often enough he was melancholy and depressed. Again we quote from Fontenelle : "Corneille was of a melancholy temperament. He required stronger emotions to make him hopeful and happy than to make him mournful or despondent. His manner was brusque, and sometimes rude in appearance, but at bottom he was very easy to live with, and he was affectionate and full of friendliness." When he heard of large sums of money being given to other men for their plays, for pieces that the world liked perhaps better than his own, he got unhappy, for he felt that his glory was departing from him. Need we go back two hundred years to find instances of men who have become unhappy from similar causes? There are many such in London and in Paris at this moment. Early in his career, before the days of the Cid, he was proud of his calling. He gloried in being one of the dramatic authors of his time. He says:—

And also :

Le théâtre est un fief dont les rentes sont bonnes.

Mon travail sans appui monte sur le théâtre,
Chacun en liberté l'y blâme ou l'idolâtre.

Then he had the ball at his feet, and all the world was before him. He had just made his name, and was honoured by Richelieu-being appointed one of his five paid authors. But minister and poet did not like each other. The autocrat was in something of the same position towards his inferior as is the big boy towards the little boy who gets

above him at school. The big boy wanted to thrash the little boy, and the little boy wouldn't have it; but at last he had to suffer for his precociousness. The big boy summoned other little boys to his assistance, and made them administer chastisement to the offender. This was the examination of the Cid by the Academy.

"En vain, contre le Cid un ministre se ligue,

Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrigue;
L'Académie en corps a beau le censurer,

Le public révolté s'obstine à l'admirer."

Corneille was a voluminous writer. He wrote nearly as many plays as Shakespeare, but his later ones are not equal to those of his best days. And he wrote a translation in verse of the Imitatione Christi. This was a pecuniary success. The book was bought and eagerly read, though now it is rarely taken down from the shelf. But his prose, unlike Racine's, which charms by its grace, is insignificant. And, unlike Racine, his speech when he was received into the French Academy was dull, and disappointed everybody. An Academical reception is one of the occasions in which Frenchmen have always expected that the recipient of honour should distinguish himself. But it was not in Corneille's power to please his audience by making a speech. We need not be too heavy upon him because his glory was not universal. As he said of himself, he was none the less Pierre Corneille. Readers have generally extolled Corneille too highly, or have not given him his due praise. This is partly from the fact that after his great success he wrote much that was unworthy of his former self; and partly, we believe at least, that even in his best plays he is too spasmodic. His fine lines come out too much by starts, amidst much that is uninteresting. The famous "Qu'il mourût" (Horace, Act III., sc. 6) is very grand, and the next line, though not English in sentiment, is fine. But the four succeeding lines are washy, and take away from the dignity of what has just gone before. Instinctively Corneille was a dramatist, and had it not been for the laws of the unities which bound him down to conventional and unwise rules, he would in all probability have risen higher in the world's esteem. He was also a poet, having the gift of poetical expression more at his command than the larger measure of composition in prose. His lines are often sweet and very stirring, for he was moved towards his subject with a true feeling of poetic chivalry. None of his lines is more quoted than one in which he proudly spoke of himself :— Je ne dois qu'à moi seul toute ma renommée.

HENRY M. TROLLOPE.

THE TUSCAN BÉRANGER.

O man since him who first sung of the other world in a tongue previously despised in this, has exercised so powerful an influence on the Italian language as the modern satirist of the Tuscan hills. What Dante effected for the spoken vernacular of his own day, raising it to be the model of classical diction, Giuseppe Giusti did for the rural idiom of his native mountains, rendering it the ideal standard of speech, and this too at the very time when the national aspirations for political unity made some such common standard a necessity for Italy.

Born of a family of provincial gentry, in the little town of Monsummano, perched high above the green amphitheatre of the Val di Nievole, it was his favourite recreation from boyhood to wander on foot among the encircling Apennines, and there he gathered from the lips of the peasantry, those poignant touches of wit and pathos, keenwhetted as by the sharp air of the uplands, with which he has enriched modern Italian. Like the medieval craftsman who elaborated from the homeliest types of nature the exquisite ornamentation of his foliated shafts, Giusti has wrought into his polished lines, with consummate effect, the shrewd proverbs interchanged in fence and foil of rustic wit by the hardy mountaineers of Pistoia, and rude shepherds of the Maremma. So entirely indeed is his vocabulary drawn from the dialect of his rural fellow-countrymen, that while it is regarded as the purest ideal of Italian Attic, it has been found necessary to publish a specially annotated edition of his poems to render them intelligible to non-Tuscan readers.

The present prevailing fashion in Italian literature tends towards an exaggeration of Giusti's peculiarities of style, and the reaction led by him against the pedantry of pseudo-classicalism threatens to carry public taste into another extreme, that of giving literary currency to all the familiar colloquialisms of Florentine street slang. The idiom of the Mercato Nuovo may be a very quaint and forcible vehicle for popular wit and eloquence, yet, at the same time, quite incapable of giving utterance to all the ideas of a higher range of culture.

The name of Béranger, borrowed by his countrymen for their

favourite lyrist, refers in reality to but one aspect of his character, that of a poet of the people. The sunny singer of the Bohemian life of Paris has no chord on his joyous lyre that vibrates to those gulfs of human nature, whence the Italian satirist draws his deeper pathos— his sterner moral. In the Tuscan character, through all classes and degrees, a keen and caustic sense of humour is associated with a profound sensibility to melancholy impressions. This dual nature, in which the sources of laughter and tears seem placed close together, was reproduced in Giusti in its most intensified form, and he repeatedly analyses its twofold aspect in his writings. Thus in the lines to Gino Capponi he describes himself as expressing

This seeming mirth, which is but grief belied.

(Questo che par sorriso ed è dolore.)

while to Girolamo Tommasi he writes in the same strain,

But ah! a laugh that echoes not within,

For like the starving mountebank am I,

Who gnawed by want to please the crowd must try
With gibe and grin.

It is this tragic sense of the incongruities of life that gives its trenchant incisiveness to Giusti's verse, sharpened like a two-edged sword with the double keenness of ridicule and wrath; the vehicle, now of denunciation, trumpet-tongued as the blast of an accusing angel, now of pungent raillery levelled at injustice or abuse with the seemingly unconscious pleasantry of Pulcinella. Half harlequin, half Mephis topheles, he launches jests or sneers indifferently, and is either grim or jocose, as the humour takes him, but ever with such unfailing mastery of his weapons that neither sneer nor jest misses its mark.

No kindred spirit to Béranger, with the fresh bubble and sparkle of French vivacity in his effervescing verse, have we in this scathed and scathing moralist, whose airiest lines suggest such deeper meanings as though the fixed and frowning eye of the genius of Tragedy were gazing at us through the disguise of the hollow comic mask. Rather among a people resembling the Tuscans in their shrewd sense and keenly penetrating humour will English readers seek a parallel to the Tuscan poet, and in Giuseppe Giusti's general turn of mind and habit of thought find a curious far-away kinship to those of Robert Burns. Giusti, like Burns, wrote in a rustic popular idiom, though with a polish of style that made it classical; like Burns, though not from necessity but choice, he lived much with the people, and was the interpreter of their feelings; like Burns he contemned and scorned the flimsy shams of society, and recognised with the same intensity the common stamp of universal humanity which