sing it in poverty and on foot, to breathe the purer atmosphere of Old English morality. Though he dedicates his work to a great lady, his feelings are with the people—a people rich and proud of a free country. Like them, his imagination is nourished by the imagery of the Bible. Like them, he loves its pastures, its forests, and its fields. Thence springs his glowing manner; thence, under a gloomy sky, and in a period of cold philosophy, is his poetry so full of freshness and colour."
Two other names of this period awaken attention and sympathy, perhaps as much by their misfortunes as their genius—Malfilâtre and Gilbert. The first had a conception of poetry which rose far above the languid elegance of St Lambert or Colardeau. His fragments translated from Virgil, though sketches, mutilated and sometimes incorrect, seem a revival, as Villemain says, of the happy boldness of Racine. He is at least the first of the French poets since Racine, who indicates something of a genuine lyrical talent; while, in perusing his imperfect compositions, we must remember that want and misfortune clouded his talents, that "sharp misery had worn him to the bone," and consigned him to the grave at the age of thirty-four, ere he had time to labour for eternity.
"La faim mit au tombeau Malfilâtre ignore,"
said Gilbert, a poet of a different stamp, but resembling Malfilâtre in the early and melancholy termination of his career, which closed in suicide, committed during an accès of madness in the hospital. With a mind ardent and impetuous, with many traits of genius, and a sullen energy of expression which resembles Juvenal; with a style unequal, unformed, but always pregnant with ideas—still full of the faults of youth, but full also of the promise of a powerful manhood—his fate, like that of Chatterton, excites deep sympathy and regret for the early blight of a genius which promised to revive, in some degree, the sinking spirit of poetry in a worn-out and helplessly prosaic period.
It is somewhat singular, indeed, to find that the spirit of poetry, no longer able to animate into life an exhausted frame, passes in some shape into that of science, and communicates eloquence, warmth, and imagination to the descriptions of natural history, in the animated pages of Buffon. It is doubtful whether Buffon is entitled to the character of a man of genius, and still more to the magnificent eulogy which he lived to see inscribed on his statue, "Majestati naturæ par ingenium'"—his own conception of genius, which he described as une longue patience, seems rather to indicate a man of strong conception, united to resolution and perseverance of character; and to the union of these qualities, the laborious and yet striking compositions of Buffon owe their origin. "Some descriptions," says Villemain, "have been extracted from his great work, which it is usual to admire in an insulated form. This is doing Buffon injustice; the great merit of his works on animal life lies, on the whole, in the way in which tradition, observation, narrative, and criticism, are united and blended. The too pompous elegance of some of his commencements, only makes way for the precision of details, and the clear simplicity of narrative; and it is there, in particular, that his excellence as a writer consists.
"The true or conjectural painting of the habits of animals—the description of the places which they inhabit—this contrast, this blending of animate and inanimate nature, present the most vivid colours to the historian. Pliny has sometimes caught them in their greatest diversities—as he describes the lion or the nightingale, he is by turns energetic or brilliant, with the same striking effect. Buffon is more equal, more elevated, more pure. Pliny belonged to that school of imagination rather than taste, which, in Tacitus, produced one incomparable painter, but which is elsewhere stamped with the impress of declamation and subtility. Pliny frequently throws the veil of a far-fetched style over fables or notions in themselves false. Buffon, enlightened by modern science, is severe and precise even in his most ornate descriptions. His diction, more irreproachable than that of Rousseau, is free from that affectation which mingles with the style (so truly French) of Montesquieu. By another and still rarer privilege, during forty years no decline, no falling off, is visible in his mind—if we except some needless circumlocutions, some pompous phrases,
