intimate. He refused the manuscripts of none, he advised, laughed, and
consoled. His criticism was sure. Several, notably Marcel Prevost, were
launched by his authority. The same deep security of literary judgment
which had permitted him to chastise and to perfect his impeccable
sonnets into their final form permitted him also to hold up before his
eyes, grasp, and judge the work of every other man.

His frailty, as must always be the frailty of such men, was
fastidiousness. The same sensitive consciousness which is said to have
all but lost us the Aeneid, and which certainly all but lost us the
Apologia, dominated his otherwise vigorous soul. It is more than forty
years since his first verse, written just upon achieving his majority,
appeared in the old _Revue de Paris_ and in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. It was not till 1893 that he collected in one volume the
scattered sonnets of his youth and middle age: the collection won him
somewhat tardily his chair in the Academy. There is irony in the
reminiscence that the man he defeated in that election was Zola.

All the great men who saluted his advent are dead. Theophile Gautier,
who first established his fame; Hugo, who addressed to him, perhaps,
that vigorous appeal in which strict labour is deified, and the medal
and the marble bust are shown to outlive the greatest glories, are
sometimes quoted as the last among the great French writers.

The immediate future will show that the stream of French excellence in
this department, as in any other of human activity, is full, deep, and
steady. The work of Heredia will help to prove it. He was a Spaniard,
and a Colonial Spaniard. No other nation, perhaps, except the modern
French, so inherit the romantic appetite of the later Roman Empire as to
be able to mould and absorb every exterior element of excellence. It is