e younger of them having used the
misfortunes of the elder to point his own complaints. Malfilatre, a
Norman by birth, had the ill-luck to write a piece of verse which gained
a provincial success. He at once set out for Paris to make his fortune.
He obtained the post of secretary to the Count de Lauraguais, wrote
verses not without grace and full of a certain tender melancholy, and
died at the age of thirty, his health broken by privations and
disappointment. Gilbert, a stronger man, but who has been somewhat
honoured by being called the French Chatterton, died still younger,
after writing some vigorous satire, and a 'complaint' or elegy which has
a good deal of pathos. But he did not, as is generally said, die of
want, though he did die in a public hospital, having been carried
thither after a fall from his horse.

[Sidenote: Parny.]

The places accorded by their contemporaries to Delille and Lebrun really
belonged to two writers of very different character and fortune, Parny
and Andre Chenier. Evariste de Parny, a native of the island of Bourbon,
was called by the aged Voltaire 'mon cher Tibulle,' and displays, with
much of the frivolity and false gallantry of the time, an extraordinary
command of simple elegiac verse, and a manner almost antique in its
simplicity and sweetness. Parny's best piece, a short epitaph on a young
girl, is one of the best things of its kind in literature. His merits,
however, are confined to his early works. In his maturer years he wrote
long poems, on the model of the _Pucelle_, against England,
Christianity, and Monarchism, which are equally remarkable for
blasphemy, obscenity, extravagance, and dulness. His friend Bertin, like
him a creole, resembled him in the command of graceful elegiac and
epistolary verse, but had not what Parny sometimes had, genuine
passion.

[Sidenote: Chenier.]

Andre Marie de Chenier[285], beyond question the greatest poet of the
eighteenth century in France, was born at Constantinople, where his
father was consul-general, in 1762. His mother was a Greek. His family
returned to France when he was a child; he was educated carefully, and
for a short time served in the army, but soon left it. After a time he
was attached (in 1787) to the French embassy in London. Here he spent
four years. Returning to France he sympathised, but on the moderate
side, with the Revolution. The growth of the Jacobin spirit horrified
him, and the excesses of the summer of 1792 deci