should have been that fortunately manufactured article. You were,
in matters of the Muses, the child of many prayers. Never, since
Adam's day, have any parents but yours prayed for a poet-child.
Then Destiny, that mocks the desires of men in general, and fathers
in particular, heard the appeal, and presented M. Chapelain and
Jeanne Corbiere his wife with the future author of "La Pucelle." Oh
futile hopes of men, O pectora caeca! All was done that education
could do for a genius which, among other qualities, "especially
lacked fire and imagination," and an ear for verse--sad defects
these in a child of the Muses. Your training in all the mechanics
and metaphysics of criticism might have made you exclaim, like
Rasselas, "Enough! Thou hast convinced me that no human being can
ever be a Poet." Unhappily, you succeeded in convincing Cardinal
Richelieu that to be a Poet was well within your powers, you
received a pension of one thousand crowns, and were made Captain of
the Cardinal's Minstrels, as M. de Treville was Captain of the
King's Musketeers.

Ah, pleasant age to live in, when good intentions in poetry were
more richly endowed than ever is Research, even Research in
Prehistoric English, among us niggard moderns! How I wish I knew a
Cardinal, or even, as you did, a Prime Minister, who would praise
and pension ME; but envy be still! Your existence was made happy
indeed; you constructed odes, corrected sonnets, presided at the
Hotel Rambouillet, while the learned ladies were still young and
fair, and you enjoyed a prodigious celebrity on the score of your
yet unpublished Epic. "Who, indeed," says a sympathetic author, M.
Theophile Gautier, "who could expect less than a miracle from a man
so deeply learned in the laws of art--a perfect Turk in the science
of poetry, a person so well pensioned, and so favoured by the