Et qu'il me fallût quitter
L'amour de ma mie:

Je dirois au Roi Henri,
Reprenez votre Paris:
J'aime mieux ma mie, oh gay!
J'aime mieux ma mie.'

A simple thing enough, as Alceste says after his first recital of

it:

La rime n'est pas riche, et le style en est vieux.'

But what an exquisite turn of Molière's art to make him repeat it once more, and what a treat it was in the days now past to hear the double delivery of those lines by Bressant, rising at the end to a solemn triumphal dignity, the everlasting protest of a gentleman of the old school against ephemeral frivolity! Perhaps it was a little too impressive for dramatic probability. Bressant's Alceste would have swept the pedants and fribbles out of the room. Delaunay made more, I think, of the real humanity of Alceste; he was the man who would be sympathetic if any of those about him would show something deserving of his sympathy. Bressant was incomparable in the majesty of high comedy, unbending to generous humour or touched with tragedy as the action demands. One of the most tragic things I ever heard was his delivery of the last words in 'Les Caprices de Marianne:' 'Je ne vous aime pas, Marianne, c'était Colio qui vous aimait.'

If there be poetic justice for good artists in Elysium, Bressant should be expounding the glories of French comedy-or rather la Comédie Française-to Charles Lamb, who had no chance of knowing them in this world, and Shakespeare and Musset should be in the front row. The Musset of Comédies et Proverbes' I mean; never mind the vexed question where his poetry ought to rank. Why don't I see Victor Hugo in that front row? Because I doubt whether the same row would hold him and Shakespeare. The old man was so cock-sure that he knew all about Shakespeare; and then he would want Shakespeare's views on the universe and the wickedness of kings, and I don't think William would relish that sort of conversation between the acts.

M. Delaunay lives in honoured retirement, and, I believe, still imparts the traditions of the good school of acting to the younger generation. We old folk shall never believe the new-comers can be as good, for all that even a Delaunay can teach them: but we may be wrong, and anyhow we don't mean to despair of France

1

while the Théâtre Français flourishes, or while the Collège de France can show scholars like James Darmesteter—the man who came out to India and got to know the Afghans as no Englishman knew them. I wrote to you about him when I met him on the frontier. Let us see what Shipley says, having studied for his own purposes in Paris (he has just called to settle the dining-out arrangements for the Ring week). "French degeneration ? answers he, as nearly snorting as an amiable man can. I know nothing about French politics, but I shall begin to talk about France being degenerate when we have learnt at the Record Office half the things they can teach us at the École des Chartes. Don't ask me, my dear Elizabeth, what the Ecole des Chartes is. First, because I do not clearly know, and next because you had better wait till you can ask Shipley, who has been there. Something at the back of my head tells me that we may possibly come to see a good deal more of him. It would be with my good-will. Not a word to anyone if you take my meaning, for it is only a dim surmise. I like the man much, especially when I can get him disengaged from our mixed visitors.

Mixed they are just now more than usual, being all full of grievances or projects of their own, and each with only half an ear for anything else. Minnie bemoans, as aforesaid, the darkness of the Clayshott division, while Leagrave congratulates himself—meaning a little to include the world, though he does not say so—upon that long-promised monograph on Drake being off his hands. Now he wants to turn to something literary, a lesser light of the seventeenth century for choice. It is rather embarrassing for Margaret to have to find an opinion whether Cowley or Henry More would be more suitable. It is useless in such a case to tell our excellent Stephen that you

have read very little of the one author and not a word of the other. He only goes on as if he did not believe you. Harry, who is our usual resource on these occasions—having a military and official faculty of looking respectfully intelligent whenever required—is himself engrossed in endeavouring to get sent to Egypt. He says he is afraid of becoming a mere pen-and-ink soldier if he does not go back to seeing the stuff his work is made of; anyhow, he is pressing for something that will take him to the front, and, as his superiors are well pleased with him, I should think he is likely to get it. A fresh parting just when we are all (comparatively) together would be some disappointment—but we have always held in this family that we owe ourselves to the Queen

and the country, and if the best work Harry can do for the Queen and country is up the Nile, we must not say a word that could make his going less cheerful.

Your pet minor English poets seem to be either at Tolcarne or (as I suspect) carried off by you to the parts of the North : I have not found them here. So I have nothing to say of them just now. The other day I spoke of Leconte de Lisle's handling of proper names; one of his best performances that way is in 'La Paix des Dieux,' which still sleeps, I believe, in a Revue des Deux Mondes ten years old. The spirit of man calls up before him all the gods he has ever worshipped :

• Et l'Hôte intérieur qui parlait de la sorte
Au gouffre ouvert des âmes et des temps révolus
Evoqua lentement, dans leur majesté morte,

Les apparitions des Dieux qui ne sont plus.'
With submission to the judgment of native-born French
ears, I know nothing in modern poetry to surpass the solemn
cadence of these last two lines—but I was coming to the pro-
cession of the gods. There is something Miltonic in the sequence
of strange imposing names, with just enough adjective and ex-
planation to colour them. Leconte de Lisle, being a pagan and
a Hellenist, had no love for Semitic deities, and cannot be said
to have treated them civilly; this is how he marches them on :

• Et tous les Baalim des nations farouches :
Le Molok, du sang frais de l'enfance abreuvé,
Halgâh, Gad, et Phégor, et le Seigneur des mouches,

Et sur les Khéroubim le sinistre Iahvé.'
He goes right back over the brilliant philosophy of the half-
Greek Alexandrians and the expansive moral reform of the
Prophets to the savage old thunder-god who came down from
Sinai to war with Chemosh and Baal and overthrow Dagon, as
they tell of him in the rugged fragments embedded in Judges and
Genesis, so old that the pious post-exilic editors dared not smooth
off their asperities; the Lord who captained his own battles, and
would now chastise his unruly children, now argue with them and
jest with them, like a modern frontier leader managing Afridis in

a about the same stage of tribal education. Modern respectability has forgotten him, and made unto itself a comfortable benevolent monarch, a sort of chairman of bank directors, author of the Economy of Nature and other valuable works—a Iahvé-Pignouf one might call him in Flaubertian language. What would the tellers of those wild stories of palace treasons and feud and murder

a

in the Books of Kings have thought of a peaceful rustic congregation sitting in an English church to hear them droned out as First Lessons, and taking them in a hypnotised fashion as something which must somehow be edifying to modern readers, since it is in the Bible? But the Hebrews have not forgotten the old Lord of Hosts, except maybe some who have become too prosperous. Heine had not when he put those lines into the mouth of an unsavoury Spanish rabbi combating a no less unsavoury monk:

A STUDY IN IMPOSTURE.

seem a

It is an old and sensible saying, Populus vult decipi et decipiatur. Wherever there is a public eager for a new sensation, and credulously keen to have it spiced by the assurance that in this case 'truth is stranger than fiction,' there will never be a lack of adventurers ready to oblige. Nowadays, of course, we are all so much wiser than our ancestors that we can easily detect the most impudent and best advertised of impostors. Yet history repeats itself, and it is worth while to draw attention some odd features of a fraud which set the reading world agape nearly two centuries ago, if only in view of the possibility that they may one day find a parallel

George Psalmanazar, whose fraudulent account of himself as a native of Formosa made him a temporary lion in the teacup times,' was born about 1680 in the South of France. For the details of his early life we have only his own Memoirs, which may

poor
authority

for the life of one of the most audacious impostors on record. Yet the evidently genuine nature of his repentance, and the earnest piety (for which Johnson so strongly vouched) of his later life, incline us to believe that the Memoirs are as far trustworthy as can be any account which a man of fifty writes of his early years. Johnson told Mrs. Piozzi that Psalmanazar was the best man he had ever known, that his 'piety, penitence, and virtue exceeded almost what we read as wonderful even in the lives of the saints.' When asked if he ever mentioned Formosa to Psalmanazar, Johnson said he was afraid to mention even China. Johnson was a pretty good judge of men,

and Psalmanazar's latter sincerity may be taken as proved.

Psalmanazar, who persistently concealed his real name and birthplace, was the victim of conjoint vanity, imagination, and lack of early discipline. “My father,' he tells us, was of an ancient but decayed family, and had been obliged to leave my mother before I was five years old, and to live near 500 miles from her, whilst she was left to live and breed me up upon her small fortune, ... his misfortunes having put it quite out of his power contribute anything.' Psalmanazar's schoolmaster, a Franciscan

erceived the lad's quick genius for languages and retentive