im to-day in the Strand you would know at once that you
had to do with a Frenchman, and, probably, with a kind of poet.

He was short, square in the shoulders, tending in middle age to fatness.
A dark hair and beard; large brown eyes of the south; a great, rounded,
wrinkled forehead like Verlaine's; a happy mouth, a nose very
insignificant, completed him. When we meet somewhere, under cypress
trees at last, these great poets of a better age, and find Ronsard a
very happy man, Du Bellay, a gentleman; then Malherbe, for all that he
was a northerner, we may mistake, if we find him, for a Catalonian.
Villon, however Parisian, will appear the Bohemian that many cities have
produced; Charles of Orleans may seem at first but one of that very high
nobility remnants of which are still to be discovered in Europe. But
when we see Marot, our first thought will certainly be, as I have said,
that we have come across a Frenchman; and the more French for a touch of
the commonplace.

See how French was the whole career!

Whatever is new attracts him. The reformation attracts him. It was
_chic_ to have to do with these new things. He had the French ignorance
of what was foreign and alien; the French curiosity to meddle with it
because it had come from abroad; the French passion for opposing, for
struggling;--and beneath it all the large French indifference to the
problem of evil (or whatever you like to call it), the changeless French
content in certitude, upon which ease, indeed, as upon a rock, the
Church of Gaul has permanently stood and will continuously repose.

He has been a sore puzzle to the men who have never heard of these
things. Calvin (that appalling exception who had nothing in him of
France except lucidity) could make neither head nor tail of him. Geneva
was glad enough to chaunt through the nose his translations of the
Psalms, but it was woefully puzzled at his salacity, and the town was
very soon too hot to hold him in his exile. And as for the common,
partial, and ignorant histories of France, written in our tongue, they
generally make him a kind of backslider, who might have been a Huguenot
(and--who knows?--have thrown the Sacrament to beasts with the best of
them) save that, unhappily, he did not persevere. Whatever they say of
him (and some have hardly heard of him) one thing is quite certain: that
they do not understand him, and that if they did they would like him
still less than they do.

He was national in