apostrophized in full congregation. But Burns, in the midst of his errors, had preserved a great fund of religious feeling frequent allusions to the Bible animate his prose as well as his poetry. His bucolic, called the Cotter's Saturday Night, is a perfectly religious picture, the principal features of which were furnished him by his reminiscences of his paternal roof, and of the patriarchal virtues of his family.

Scenes such as are there described constitute the essence of that grandeur of old Scotland, which render her esteemed at home and reverenced abroad. Princes and great men are no more than what the breath of monarchs make them; but

"An honest man's the noblest work of God,"

and certainly, considered with reference to the celestial road of virtue, the cottage leaves the palace far in the background. What is the real value of worldly pomp? It is a heavy burden. Burns has written in English oftener than in Scotch. Sometimes, indeed, he passes in the same poem from one of these two idioms to the other: this is what his countrymen call the Doric style of the north. Let no one imagine that Burns's language is a patois; the polished inhabitants of capitals such as Paris and London are too ready to proscribe as rude the provincial dialects: they are to be pitied for not being enabled to feel their real charm. Pope and Gay employed themselves in translating the verses of

Allan Ramsay. We Frenchmen of the provinces, when transplanted to Paris, can discover in our disdained patois a multitude of natural or energetic words and old idioms, the absence of which has remarkably impoverished the language of Froissard, Montaigne, and Marot. For myself,

I discover in my Arlesian dialect the language of a once independent state, which had its detached laws, character, and manners. My fancy associates it with the history of those old times, the relievoed but somewhat barbarous forms of which the prism of poetry softens down. This dialect was the language of more than one ancient hero who is still popular, and of those Troubadours, who subsisted in some degree on love, poetry, and glory; it was also the language of my childhood, of

my first sports round the domestic hearth, and my first schoolboy friendships. How often in the midst of the bustle of Paris, while traversing the dense ranks of the crowd, have I turned round in strong emotion on hearing a familiar phrase or exclamation of my natal country. That phrase, like the song of the Thrush to poor Susan,* evoked a sudden train of tender images and affecting associations.†

We formerly possessed poets, whose forgotten names one sometimes meets with in turning over the pages of biography, such as Morand, the author

• See the letters in Wordsworth, vol. 2.

Sent when very young to the college of Juilly, I remember how distrest I felt in finding on my return to my natal town, that I had forgotten its language. I considered myself a foreigner, till I had lost a little of my Parisian accent, and re-learned my patois.

of Teglis, who threw his hat at the pit, and indemnified it by that boutade of his provençal originality for a bad scene in his comedy; or Robin, who wrote a petition in verse to Lewis XIV., and demonstrated how much the art of elegantly turning an eulogium had improved, even in Provence, under the classical dictatorship of Boileau.

Que faire de mon Isle? Il n'y croit que de saules,

Et tu n'aime, que les Lauriers."

He

But Morand and Robin wrote in French; they are completely forgotten by our people, while they know by heart a great number of the verses of Coye, whose name, perhaps, is not to be found in any dictionary. This Coye has written in the Troubadour dialect with great energy, and with the unaffected exuberance of gay buffoonery. also might have been an Arlesian Burns; but with a few domestic allusions, which make us laugh or affect us in his works, he has combined too many images alien from local ideas; with a smattering of literature, he has studied less the traditions of the classic periods than the academic poetry of modern Paris. While writing the language of the people, it might be sur mised, that he disdained their suffrage for that of our highly ridiculous Arlesian Academy of thirty gentlemen.* Though the heir of the Troubadours, the unlucky poet has not sighed a single couplet of tenderness, and has left nothing but a too cele

That academy no longer exists. It is true that we, probably, no longer possess three Gentilshommes.

brated ode, deploring the agonies of physical love. He neglects popular superstitions, in order to invoke Apollo, Pegasus, the whole Pagan Olympus, and talk to us about the pious Eneas. In his poem of the Delire, or La Descente aux Enfers, he describes the Styx, Charon, the Eumenides, Pluto, Proserpine, &c.; and it is to Virgil's Elysium, that he goes in search of the Archbishop of Arles, the virtuous Jansen. But as if the national muse had resolved on punishing him for thus belying her inspiration, and the true titles of our glory, she has rendered his vision of the past imperfect; and he has been incapable of perceiving and distinguishing among those to whom death is a source of joy, our Wallaces and Bruces; neither the celebrated Porcelet, whose virtue saved him from the general massacre of the Sicilian vespers; nor the Chevalier Bozon, who killed the Dragon of Rhodes; nor Quequeran de Beaugen, who singly dared to conceive and execute the project of delivering his uncle from Mussulman captivity; nor finally, if we re-ascend to the period of our republic, the Pons Gaillards, and the Bertrand Ventairons, whose energy and courage prompted them to protest against our already degenerate nobility, and against the cowardice of the prelate, by whom our independence was sold to Charles of Anjou.

I must have imperfectly expressed myself, if it be believed that I wish entirely to proscribe mythological names and comparisons. Some of them are sacred; such as express a moral idea, or a physical phenomenon, may be happy synonymes for poetry;

as Phoebus for the sun; Vulcan for fire, &c. Besides, it were a vain attempt to escape entirely from the influence of college education. As to Coye, although he was little better educated than Burns, he was the more excusable for invoking the deities of paganism, since he wrote in a town, replete with vestiges of the worship and power of pagan Rome. The Venus of Arles was admired at the Parisian Museum, when the Venus de Medici still shone there; at every step he took, Coye might contemplate some noble ruin, such as a statue of Jupiter, the porticos of an ancient temple, tombs dedicated to the Dii Manes, the obelisk of Marius, &c., and our magnificent amphitheatre,*-one of those gigantic creations destined to transmit to posterity the divinity of the Roman people, and worthy of the architects of that empress of the world, who swore by her own eternity. What I reproach him with having forgotten is, that the cross planted by Trophime, crowns the summits of all those monuments which are still erect, or which lie half buried in their own ruins.

I hope to be pardoned these digressions in favour of my natal soil, respecting which I have otherwise endeavoured to preserve as sober a tone as possible through the course of this work I

* I learn that through the intervention of our new mayor, Baron Laugier de Chartrouse, workmen are beginning to clear these magnificent arenas; but a labour of this kind can proceed but slowly under the Vandalism of the present ministry. Much, however, may be expected from the enlightened zeal of so worthy a man as M. Laugier.