sentimental creature whom every man must secretly envy and every woman
passionately adore. He had all the vanity of Rousseau, but none of his
honesty. Rousseau, at any rate, never imposed upon himself; and
Chateaubriand always did. Thus the vision that we have of him is of
something wonderful but empty, something striking but unreal. It is the
rhetorician that we see, and not the man.

Chateaubriand's influence was very great. Beside his high-flowing,
romantic, imaginative writings, the tradition of the eighteenth century
seemed to shrivel up into something thin, cold and insignificant. A new
and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers--a world in which
the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and
among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. His works became
at once highly popular, though it was not until a generation later that
their full effect was felt. Meanwhile, the impetus which he had started
was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of
Nature, the same religious outlook, the same insistence on the
individual point of view; but the tints are less brilliant, the emphasis
is more restrained; the rhetorical impulse still dominates, but it is
the rhetoric of elegiac tenderness rather than of picturesque pomp. A
wonderful limpidity of versification which, while it is always perfectly
easy, is never weak, and a charming quietude of sentiment which, however
near it may seem to come to the commonplace, always just escapes
it--these qualities give Lamartine a distinguished place in the
literature of France. They may be seen in their perfection in the most
famous of his poems, _Le Lac_, a monody descriptive of his feelings on
returning alone to the shores of the lake where he had formerly passed
the day with his mistress. And throughout all his poetical work
precisely the same characteristics are to be found. Lamartine's lyre
gave forth an inexhaustible flow of melody--always faultless, always