en mettant bout à bout, &c. : ' by stringing tags

Page 52. 1. 20. Cymodocée. The heroine of the principal story in the Martyrs is a pagan girl, who falls in love with the Christian hero Eudore, and is converted by him. After many vicissitudes they suffer martyrdom together.

1. 3 1. la prose poétique. Poetry was not Scherer's strong point. The question is not to be determined offhand by his verbal dilemma. It is too wide a one to be discussed in a note, but Coleridge's apophthegm that the opposite of poetry is not prose, but science, may give a clue to a différent solution. Chateaubriand in the préface quotes in defence Aristotle's Poetics, which lays down that an epic may be either in verse or in prose.

Page 53. 1. 4. en hexamètres. In alexandrines, not Latin and Greek hexameters.

1. 18. la Fête-Dieu, &c. ' Corpus Christi day, Rogation days (the three days before Ascension Day), and Twelfth Day or Epiphany.'

1. 34. M. Sainte-Beuve. His wide and profound knowledge of past literature may excuse him for not keeping abreast with more modem developments. See the essay on Sainte- Beuve.

1. 37. Racine et Virgile. ' Parallèle de Virgile et de Racine ' forms the tenth chapter of Le Génie. The meeting of Virgil and the Sibyl in the sixth Aeneid is compared with the speech of the high priest about to crown Joash in Athalie, to the advantage of the latter. The qualities the two poets hâve in common are polish, taste, language at once bold and natural, sublimity in depicting love. Racine is superior in invention of characters, especially in his women. Athalie is ' l'œuvre le plus parfait du génie inspiré par la religion.' The only superiority allowed to Virgil is his pathos : ' sa voix est plus gémissante et sa lyre plus plaintive.' Sainte- Beuve's comment is : ' Quelle plus excellente, quelle plus vraie et plus pénétrante comparaison ! ' — Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, i. 322.

Page 54. 1. 15. dépréoccupation, apparently a coinage of Scherer's ; the word is not given in the dictionaries. ' An unselfish aloofness ' fairly expresses the meaning.