apoleon III., and died not long afterwards--in 1869. The chief works
of Lamartine are, in verse, the already mentioned _Meditations_ (of
which a new series appeared in 1823), the _Harmonies_, 1829, the
_Recueillements_, _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_, _Jocelyn_,
_La Chute d'un Ange_, the two last being fragments of a huge epic poem
on the ages of the world; in prose, _Souvenirs d'Orient_, _Histoire des
Girondins_, _Les Confidences_, _Raphael_, _Graziella_, besides an
immense amount of work for the booksellers, in history, biography,
criticism, and fiction, produced in his later days. Lamartine's
characteristics, both in prose and verse, are well marked. He is before
all things a sentimentalist and a landscape-painter. He may indeed be
said to have wrought into verse what Rousseau, Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, and Chateaubriand had already expressed in prose,
supplying only an additional, and perhaps original, note of meditative
tenderness. Lamartine's verse is exquisitely harmonious, and frequently
picturesque; but it is deficient in vigour and brilliancy, and marred by
the perpetual current of sentimental complaining. Beyond this he never
could get; his only important attempt in a different and larger style,
the _Chute d'un Ange_, being, though not without merits, on the whole a
failure. In harmony of verse and delicate tenderness of feeling his
poetry was an enormous advance on the eighteenth century, and its power
over its first readers is easily understood. But Lamartine made little,
if any, organic change in the mechanism of French poetry, so far as its
versification is concerned, while his want of range in subject equally
disabled him from effecting a revolution. His best poems, such as _Le
Lac_, _Paysage dans le Golfe de Genes_, _Le Premier Regret_, are however
among the happiest expressions of a dainty but rather conventional
melancholy, irreproachable from the point of view of morals and
religion, thoroughly well bred, and creditably aware of the beauties of
nature, which it describes and reproduces with a great deal of skill.

[Sidenote: Lamennais.]

The next name on the list belongs to a far stronger, if a less
accomplished, spirit than Lamartine. Felicite Robert de Lamennais was
born in 1782, at St. Malo. In the confusion of the last decade of the
eighteenth century, when, as a contemporary bears witness, even persons
holding important state offices had often received no regular education
whatever,