dans leurs lubricités : in their wanton fits

Page 68. 1. 45. en sa muraille, The plural would hère be more clear : * within his walls.'

Page 69. 1. 73. Et telles sont pourtant les colonnes d^ Hercule : Calpe (ancient name of Gibraltar and Abyla,) (now called Algeciras) on the African shore were the two columns, hère vievved exactly as are Charybdis and Scylla, i. e. as the two homs of a dilemma, as specified in the following Unes.

l« 75» génération is generally counted as five syllables.

1. 80. Et n'être en son logis: ne has hère the force of the full négation.

1. 85. Par V éternel défaut. Défaut is used hère in the etymological sensé, without any religious qualification.

1. 100. Est digne pour ses dieux, for the deity it enshrines.

It is a pity the poet did not remember that Bedlam is a contracted form of Bethlehem : that name, inscribed over the gâte of Pride at Bay, might hâve suggested to him a powerful contrast, and perhaps a more comforting conclusion.

La Lyre d'Airain.

Page 70. 1. 4 . Les plus beaux fils de la lyre : most likely Goethe and Leopardi.

1. 1 3. Et les bruits de ses fabriques. However kind and humane may be the noble paradox expressed in this stanza, we cannot but feel how unjust it is to the great poets who were then just dead, such as Shelley, Keats, Byron, or still singing, as Wordsworth.

1. 23. leur aile vagabonde , the Winds. Page 71. 1. 46. des cris sourds et plaintifs. To set a right estimate on this remarkable verse we must bear in mind that it was written between 1833 and 1837, or nearly ten years before Elizabeth Barrett had been moved by the Report of Home on * The Employment of Children in Mines and Manu-

factures/ 1843 ; before the * Song of the Shirt,' first issued in Punch, Christmas Number, 1843 ; before the 'social novel' in England had won its famé ; and fully a génération before Zola had inaugurated its French counterpart in his séries of social studies.

Page 72. 1. 63. Hère our mind is irresistibly drawn to the *Cry of the Ghildren.* Ma mère at once strikes the right note. The poetess also, in the third line, thinks of their mothers.

1. 65. Barbier seldom uses this alexandrine with two pauses : it is hère most effective. Les yeux tournés vers les campagnes ; cf. in Elizabeth Barrett :

The young lambs are bleating in the meadows . . .

. . . But the young, young children

I. 114. Les humaines chansons. From the following adjectives \ve gather that chanson has nothing essentially merry in itself.

II. 107-16. Thèse Unes are as graphically vivid as are 11. 38-46. The next outburst (11. 117-29) is less modem, more romantic, and with a distant Ossianic ring.

Page 74. 1. 136. Parce que doux 'viveurs. Note the calm boldness of this neologism used strictly in the etymological sensé, without any taint of the colloquial meaning attached to the word viveur.

1. 155. This poem has not the same subject as *The Cry of the Ghildren.' We confess we do not find in it the same emotional power and impassioned rythm ; but its scope is larger and its symbolic value as the * cry of an âge ' perhaps almost as great. In this respect it is, to our rnind, the central pièce of * Lazare.'

Conscience.

Page 75. This poem reads much like a conclusion to La lyre d'airain. The élément of religions musing and hope which, by an English poet, had been blended with the moanings of workman, children, wife and mother, is hère expressed apart, for its own sake, with Barbier's own intense feeling, and with the gênerai bearing to which French poets, as well as French thinkers, are so partial.

1. 8. A vous faire jeter une plainte damnable : vast enough to make one send forth to heaven an unholy lament.