ded his attitude and his
fate. He wrote frequently in the _Journal de Paris_, the organ of the
moderate royalist party. Although he did not in any way put himself
forward, he was at last arrested in March, 1794, and was guillotined on
the seventh Thermidor, two days only before the event which would have
saved him, the fall of Robespierre. His poems were not published till
long after his death, and the text of them is even now in an
unsatisfactory condition, many having been left unfinished and
uncorrected by the author. Andre Chenier is sometimes considered as a
precursor of the Romantic reform, but this is a mistake. His critical
comments on Shakespeare and other writers, his favourite studies, which
were confined to the Greek and Latin classics and the humanists of the
Italian Renaissance, above all his poems themselves, prove the contrary.
A Greek by birthplace, and half a Greek by blood, his tastes and
standards were wholly classical. But the fire and force of his poetical
genius made the blood circulate afresh in the veins of the old French
classical tradition, without, however, permanently strengthening or
renovating it. The poetry of Chenier is still in the main the poetry of
Racine, though with infinitely more glow of colour and variety of
harmony. His poems are mostly antique in their titles and plan,
eclogues, elegies, and so forth, and are not free from a certain
artificiality inseparable from the style. _La Jeune Tarentine_, _La
Jeune Captive_, _L'Aveugle_, and some others, are of extreme merit, and
all over his work (much of which is in the most fragmentary condition)
lines and phrases of extraordinary beauty are scattered. The noble
_Iambes_, or political and satirical poems, which he wrote in prison,
just before his death, bear out, perhaps better than anything else, his
well-known saying, as he touched his head when sentence had been passed,
'et pourtant il y avait quelque chose la.'

[Sidenote: Minor Poets.]

A few other poets or verse-makers of merit before the revival of poetry
proper must be rapidly noticed. The fable of La Fontaine was cultivated
vigorously, in particular by Florian, a favourite pupil of Voltaire, who
will reappear in these pages. Florian's fables are graceful copies of
his master. Those of Arnault, with less grace, have more originality;
often, indeed, Arnault's short moral poems are not so much fables as
what used to be called in English 'emblems.' The most famous of these,
whi