up somewhat, and during the last decade some isolated poets of
promise have appeared. M. Maurice Bouchor recurred to the bacchanalian
model for inspiration; M. Paul Deroulede is tyrtaean and bellicose. Both
of these may be said to be representative of reaction against the
_Parnasse_. The new naturalist school, which has produced such singular
work in prose fiction, is represented in poetry by M. Richepin and M.
Guy de Maupassant. The former, with much unworthy work, produced in _La
Mer_ and elsewhere excellent things. The latter, despite an unfortunate
licence of subject, showed himself the strongest and most accomplished
versifier who has made his appearance in France for the last twenty
years. But after his first efforts he appeared to abandon himself almost
entirely to prose. M. Paul Verlaine, a poet known from the early days of
the Parnasse, has more recently produced work of increased but very
unequal merit, exaggerating the faults but showing some of the charm of
Baudelaire; and, partly under his, partly under foreign influence, a
still younger school has begun to make experiments in prosody which are
not uninteresting, but which are too minute for notice here.

[Sidenote: Minor and later Dramatists.]

[Sidenote: Scribe.]

[Sidenote: Ponsard.]

[Sidenote: Emile Augier.]

[Sidenote: Eugene Labiche.]

[Sidenote: Dumas the Younger.]

[Sidenote: Victorien Sardou.]

The progress of French drama during the last half century is of somewhat
less importance to literature, but of even more to social history, than
that of poetry. The greatest masters of drama have already been
mentioned among the eight typical names of 1830, even Balzac having
attempted it, though without much success. The most famous and
successful playwrights, however, as distinguished from the producers of
literary dramas, have yet to be noticed[293]. Pixerecourt, a
melodramatist and a book-collector, achieved his first success with a
play on the well-known story of the Dog of Montargis (itself dating back
to the earliest days of the Chansons de Gestes), in 1814, and followed
it up with a long succession of similar pieces. Two years later Eugene
Scribe, who had been born in 1791, made his _debut_, as far as success
goes, with _Une Nuit de la Garde Nationale_. Scribe was one of the most
prolific, one of the most successful, and one of the least literary of
French dramatists. For nearly half a century he continued, sometimes
alone, and sometimes