have been known only as a poet of the court, of lighter
satire, and of love; the passions of the age transformed him into
an ardent and uncompromising combatant. His classical culture was
wide and exact; at ten years old he translated the _Crito_; Latin,
Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish were at his command. He might, had
France been at peace with herself, have appeared in literature as
a somewhat belated Ronsardist; but his hereditary cause became his
own. While still a child he accepted from his father, in presence
of the withering heads of the conspirators of Amboise, the oath of
immitigable vengeance. Pursuits, escapes, the camp, the battle-field,
the prison, the court made up no small part of his life of vicissitude
and of unalterable resolve. He roused Henri of Navarre from the
lethargy of pleasure; he warned the King against the crime of
apostasy; he dreaded the mass, but could cheerfully have accepted
the stake. Extreme in his rage of party, he yet in private affairs
could show good sense and generosity. His elder years were darkened
by what he regarded as treason in his King, and by the falling away
from the faith of that son who, by an irony of fate, became the father
of Madame de Maintenon. Four times condemned to death, he died in
exile at the age of eighty.

D'Aubigne's satirical tale, _Les Aventures du Baron de Faeneste_,
contrasts the man who _appears_--spreading his plumes in the sunshine
of the court--with the man who _is_, the man who lives upon his estate,
among his rustic neighbours, tilling his fields and serving his people
and his native land. As an elegiac poet D'Aubigne is little more than
a degenerate issue from the Pleiade. It is in his vehement poem of
mourning and indignation and woe, _Les Tragiques_, begun in 1577 but
not published till 1616, that his power is fully manifested. To
D'Aubigne, as its author, the characterisation of Sainte-Beuve
exactly applies: "Juvenal du xvi. siecle, apre, austere, inexorable,
herisse d'hyperboles, etincelant de beautes, rachetant une rudesse
grossiere par une sublime energie." In seven books it tells of the
misery of France, the treachery of princes, the abuse of public law
and justice, the fires and chains of religious persecution, the
vengeance of God against the enemies of the saints, and the final
judgment of sinners, when air and fire and water become the accusers
of those who have perverted the powers of nature to purposes of cruelty.
The poem is ill c