or what the lady was. Was
she dark or fair, passionate or gentle like himself, witty or simple?
Was it always one woman? or are there a dozen here immortalised in cold
indistinction? The old English translator mentions grey eyes in his
version of one of the amorous rondels; so far as I remember, he was
driven by some emergency of the verse; but in the absence of all sharp
lines of character and anything specific, we feel for the moment a sort
of surprise, as though the epithet were singularly happy and unusual, or
as though we had made our escape from cloudland into something tangible
and sure. The measure of Charles's indifference to all that now
preoccupies and excites a poet is best given by a positive example. If,
besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said
to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of _fourriers_,
while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his
favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of
Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the
world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man
going to order dinner.

Although they are not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run
of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are
executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with
floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly
moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin
conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally
thin and scanty of import; for the ballade presented too large a canvas,
and he was preoccupied by technical requirements. But in the rondel he
has put himself before all competitors by a happy knack and a
prevailing distinction of manner. He is very much more of a duke in his
verses than in his absurd and inconsequential career as a statesman; and
how he shows himself a duke is precisely by the absence of all
pretension, turgidity, or emphasis. He turns verses, as he would have
come into the king's presence, with a quiet accomplishment of grace.

Theodore de Banville, the youngest poet of a famous generation now
nearly extinct, and himself a sure and finished artist, knocked off, in
his happiest vein, a few experiments in imitation of Charles of Orleans.
I would recommend these modern rondels to all who care about the old
duke, not only because th