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Rh aspect, one especially which is unfailingly pointed out to Frenchmen—the old Patterson house, where that young prodigal of a Jérôme Bonaparte, as his great brother styled him, married Miss Elizabeth Patterson

The general impression of Baltimore was very well rendered by Mr. George Cable, when he said that its "aspect is quite meridional." And when he was asked to explain himself more fully, he insisted on the air of ease and the agreeable, nonchalant bearing of the promenaders in the streets—a city of leisure, a city of "residences," where the negro looks happy and the negro girls still more so

Nevertheless, I must think about my first lecture

March 25th.—My eyes wander over my audience, ascertaining in the first place that the students of the Johns Hopkins University, more courteous than our own, have not excluded women from these lectures. Doubtless they do not believe in Baltimore that the words of a professor are the exclusive property of male students, or that these words must necessarily be empty or superficial if women comprehend them. Neither do they believe, and I make the remark with singular pleasure, that the instruction given in a Protestant university should be interdicted to Catholic seminarians.

It is a short history of French poetry which I have promised to condense into nine lectures, and during the three months in which I have been thinking of my subject I have learned a good deal myself. Hence I have decided that it is especially necessary to avoid taking a purely French point of view, which evidently could not be that of either Englishmen or Americans. Something of Shakespeare, of Shelley, always escapes us; and, similarly, foreigners will never relish what we find particularly exquisite in Racine or André Chénier. Consideration of form or of pure art, which I might be tempted to put in the first rank if I were speaking in France, I relegate here to the second, and there results an arrangement or disposition of the subject which I confess I did not expect. Imperfect as are our Chansons de gestes and our Romans de la Table Ronde, I find it impossible not to give them in these lectures a place which answers to the extended influence which they once exerted in European literature and which they still exert. And where in the world should I feel myself more straitly obliged to this than here, where the sovereignly noble poet of the "Idyls of the King" has doubtless no fewer admirers than in England, and where the author of "Tristan and Iseult" may have more than in Germany? I know very well that the invention of the subject, the theme, is of small moment; and I remember most opportunely that no one, to my knowledge, has shown this better than Emerson in his essay on Shakespeare. But there is more than the subject in our "Heroic Ballads" or our "Romances of the Round Table": there is the sentiment of the subject; and nothing, to tell the truth, is lacking to them but the sentiment of form and art. I cannot devote less than three lectures to the French poetry of the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, if there should be such a thing as French classic poetry, we doubtless find it, and foreigners can hardly do otherwise, in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, the comedies of Mollière, and the fables of La Fontaine—these are really our poets—and not, I imagine, Clément Marot or Malherbe, Jean Baptiste Rousseau or Voltaire. Jean Baptiste is only a declaimer, and the other three are merely excellent prose writers who have rhymed their prose. I would still be too French—I mean too narrowly confined within the limits of our national taste—if I should try to make Americans take Boileau for a poet. Nurtured as they are in Shakespeare, I fear I should find difficulty in explaining to them and making them understand what there is "poetic," in the absolute sense of the word, in Corneille's tragedies or Molière's comedies. On this point, therefore, I will concentrate my forces. I shall bring together in one lecture all that has been attempted among us from Ronsard to Malherbe, and I will show that, as all these efforts had no other tendency, even in poetry, and perhaps especially there, than to make the court and the social spirit predominate over the spirit of individualism, this could only result "poetically" in the formation of the dramatic style on the ruins of the lyric and epic styles. I will then endeavor to show what the pure dramatic style, independent of all addition or mixture of lyricism, admits of in the way of true "poetry." And finally from Racine to the other Rousseau, Jean Jacques, putting together all of our prosateurs of the eighteenth century who fancied they were poets, I will point out in the long decline of our dramatic poetry and the corresponding development of individualism the near revival of lyricism.