D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS

'he Editor bas great pleasure ta acknowledging assistance rendered to him in the préparation of little book I>y his colleagues Mr. Francis Stoir, C. H. Gibson, of Merchant Taylors' Scbool, and J. A. Platt, to wbom he is indebted for manj

i hints and suggestions.

DNDON, Apni 1887.

ALFRED DE VIGNY

Alfred de Vigny was bom on March 27th, 1799. He belonged to a noble family of the province of Tonraine, in the centre of France. His life was on the whole a rather uneventful one. He was sixteen years of âge at the time of the fcill of Napoléon, and foUowed the example of a good many young noblemen who obtained commissions from King Louis XVIII. in the privileged régiments which were to form a kind of maison militaire du Roi. He remained in the army thirteen years, the last five or six of which he spent in regular régiments, doing his duty with remarkable conscientiousness, yet without any enthusiasm. In 1828, after becoming convinced that no reconciliation was possible between the exigencies of military discipline and the freedom and quiet necessary to the thinker and poet, he resigned his commission.

He was already known as a writer, as a poet. His best poems had beén published between 1822 and 1825. His poetry has neither the sensuous vagueness of Lamartine's, nor the lofty, soul-stirring tones of Hugo's. It is rather refined and melancholy. He never sings, seldom weeps ; a sad, pensive smile is what his poetry most commonly suggests. The lot of the poet he usually considers a sad one. The

ALFRED DE VIGNY

'lo, one of hia best books, he devoted to the he sufTerings of the poet in this practical world

t remembered work is Cinq-Mars, an admirably , which, in spite of the altogether too dark which, owing to the aristocratie proclivities of icheUeu is painted, remains the best, if not the itorical novel France has.

if his greatest popularity was the year 182g, iuced at the Odéon théâtre his adaptation of

Othello. He was then wîth Victor Hugo and limas one of a valiant phalanx of young nriters lermined to free the French stage from the >sed upon it by the rigid niles of the classtca] B seventeenth century. As an original writer of id not remarkably suceeed, although his drama

(1835) had what was then considered a long tJy to the admirable personatioa of the heroine Ited Madame Dorval.

litie year, 1835, he published Servitude et ilitaires, a séries of sketches intended to show inilitai7 life upon human chaiacter. La Canne e of thèse sketches. The principal character of Captain Renaud, is evidently intended to preidealiïed portrait of the author. The narrative ; sketch lies fîrst in the picture of Paris before le Révolution of 1830, when in a batile of three )le of Paris defeated the royal troops and drove bon king, Charles X., from his throne ; second.

ALFRED DE VIGNY

in the description of political and military scènes of the great Napoleohic drama. But what most interested Vigny himself in his work was undoubtedly the psychological sîde of it.

In 1845 Vigny became a member of \h.^ Académie Française, where he succeeded a now altogether forgotten author of the Classical School, Etienne, and where he was himself succeeded after his death, which occurred on September i7th, 1863, t>y another dramatic writer, who, although still alîve, is even more completely forgotten than Etienne, — M. Camille Doucet.

Vigny's famé, which had grown steadily dimmer during Victor Hugo's life, when the French literary public lived in the continuons expectation of some dazzling production of the great bard's genius, is now again resuming akindofquiet and dignified splendor. His self-respecting muse, his cultured and lucid speech afford a most needed rest after the weary perusal of the self-conceitedly involved and neologistic poetry of most of the writers of the contemporary school.

A critical and sympathetic estimate of Vigny's writings will be found in Sept Grands Auteurs ^ by Alcée Fortier, Boston, D. C. Heath & Co.