t
considerable exploit in the former was a strange preface in verse to his
novel of _Madame Putiphar_; his best work in prose, a series of wild but
powerful stories entitled _Champavert_. His talent altogether lacked
measure and criticism, but it is undeniable. Auguste Fontaney was born
in 1803 and died in 1837, having, like many of the literary men of his
day, served for a short time in diplomacy. He was a frequent contributor
to the early Romantic periodicals, and somewhat later to the _Revue des
Deux-Mondes_. His work is very unequal, but at its best it is saturated
with the true spirit of poetry. Felix Arvers, like our own Blanco White,
has obtained his place in literary history by a single sonnet, one of
the most beautiful ever written. Auguste de Chatillon was both poet and
painter; his chief title to remembrance in the former capacity being a
volume of cheerful verse entitled _A l'Auberge de la Grand' Pinte_.
Napoleon Peyrat, who, after the fashion of those times (in which Auguste
Maquet, a fertile novelist, and a journalist, and a collaborateur of
Alexandre Dumas, called himself Augustus Mackeat, and Theophile Dondey
anagrammatised his surname into O'Neddy), dubbed himself Napol le
Pyreneen, survives, and justly, in virtue of a single short poem on
_Roland_, possessed of extraordinary _verve_ and spirit. Last of all has
to be mentioned Louis Bertrand, a poet possessed of the rarest faculty,
but unfortunately doomed to misfortune and premature death. Born at Ceva
in Piedmont, in 1807, and brought up at Dijon, he came to Paris, found
there but scanty encouragement, and died in a hospital in 1841. His only
work of any importance, _Gaspard de la Nuit_, a series of prose ballads
arranged in verses something like those of the English translation of
the Bible, and testifying to the most delicate sense of rhythm, and the
most exquisite power of poetical suggestion, did not appear until after
his death. He and Borel perhaps only of the names contained in this
paragraph represent individual and solid talent: the others are chiefly
noteworthy as instances of the extraordinary stimulating force of the
time on minds which in other days would probably have remained indocile
to poetry, or at least unproductive of it.

[Sidenote: Second Group of Romantic Poets.]

Three distinct stages are perceptible in French poetry since the date of
the Romantic movement, and we have now exhausted the remarkable names
belonging to the first.