tured front of his own brother of the classic
age—Anacreon! The dearest old face in the
world—the simplest form—the kindliest
features. Yet withal a face, a form, and features
about which notwithstanding their exceeding
simplicity and homeliness, nothing, absolutely
nothing, seemed to come incongruously in the
way of even the loveliest, the most aërial,
or the most fantastically exquisite associations.
One could fancy the Fairies playing
at hide-and-seek between his slippers, or a
stray Cupid secreting itself on the sly in
one of his pockets. His voice sounded with
a tender intonation, thrilling alternately
with tears and laughter. His eyes brimmed
with the pathetic, or sparkled with the
humorous. His cheek flushed with the
praise rather than with the quaffing of the
delicious draughts of the love and the wine
and the glory he sang of. For, this old man
in the old coat—slipshod and bald-pated—was
the Song-writer of his Age, the boast of
French literature, the darling of the French
population! During nearly half a century,
throughout a long delightful interval of more
than forty years, his poetry, the poetry of
his Great Heart, has been to the entire mass
of the people in his native land, whether
gentle or simple, grey-beards or little children,
at once a joy and a consolation. And
no wonder—for, of all song-writers, Béranger
was undoubtedly both the most natural
and the most national: more so even, if that
be possible, than Moore was to Erin, or
Burns to Caledonia! His very style, in
truth, was so intrinsically naturalised and
nationalised; it was, so to speak, in the very
grain and colour of it, so intensely idiomatic
and indigenous, as absolutely to defy
anything like adequate translation. Insomuch
that the happiest foreign version of any one
of his songs ever yet accomplished, is, at the
best, but as a plum that has been fingered!
A butterfly—caught, no doubt, but with the
golden bloom draggled off its purple wings
in the catching. A flower with the dew
shaken out of it, and the aroma gone, and
the petals withered.

What songs they are, these Chansons of
Béranger! Expressive of every kind of
emotion that can ever stir our heart.
Songs of love and battle; of grief and gaiety;
of sarcasm and tenderness. Celebrations
of glory and of beauty, of victory and
defeat, of the homely and the heroic.
Ditties that have often and often been, that
will again and yet again be (how many a
time to come!) crooned gently by the cradle,
and chanted dolefully by the bier,—music
thrilling deeply and tenderly into the heart
of a great people, listened to by them, and
loved by them, as Saul listened to and loved
the harp-tones of the Shepherd of the
Terebynthine Valley.

How it happened that Béranger came to
be a song-writer at all, he himself has
related, and this moreover in some of the
loveliest of his many noble effusions. He has
embalmed the flies and straws of his lowly
experience in the amber of his verse: and
for once we don't "wonder how the devil
they got there!" Very precious memorials
they are of the man to those who love him
—and who among us all has not an affection
for this Trouvère in the home-spun broadcloth,
this Bard of the Guinguette? Above
all, they are inestimable attestations of the
unaffected simplicity and nobility of his
character.

It was in Paris (of all places), at number
fifty in the Rue Montorgueil, on the
nineteenth of August, seventeen hundred
and eighty, that Pierre Jean de Béranger
was born—Paris ("full of gold and woe")
being appropriately the birthplace and the
deathplace of this most intensely French of
Frenchmen. He breathed his first breath,
he tells us, in the house of a poor tailor—
his maternal grandfather. He not merely
tell us this—he sings it—sings the very
names and dates (precisely as we have here
given them), the humble trade and the lowly
parentage.

  "Dans ce Paris plein d'or et de misère,
  En I'an du Christ mil sept cent quatre-vingt
  Chez un tailleur, mon pauvre et vieux grand-père,
  Moi nouveau-né, sachez ce qui m'advint."

And thereupon he chants to us (how
melodiously!) the surprise of his old grandsire,
the Snip, on finding him one day
tenderly rocked in the arms of a Fairy, "who
with gay refrains lulled the cry of his first
sorrows:

      "Et cette fée avec des gaïs refrains,
      Calmait le cri de mes premiers chagrins."

Another of these charming little autobiographic
Chansons, recounts the awful source
of this holy mission of the Song-writer.
It is called Ma Vocation. And it relates
how a mournful wail issuing from his new-born
lips, the dear God said to him—"Sing,
sing, poor little one!" Everything is touchingly
and truthfully particularised in this
manly and modest egotism of Béranger.
Even the drowsy lullaby sung to him by the
pretty bonne, Ma Nourice, who hushed him
to rest in his infancy.

                "Dodo, l'enfant do,
                L'enfant dormira tantôt."

                "Bye-bye, baby, bye!
                Sleep, my baby, bye-and-bye!"

So likewise in the Recollections of Childhood,
Souvenirs d'Enfance, he commemorates
the games and tasks of the dear schooldays,
when, from his tenth to his sixteenth
years, from seventeen hundred and ninety to
seventeen hundred and ninety-six, he lived
during those troublous times among his
friends and relatives in the town of Péronne.
Later on, he sings regretfully of the joyous
hours passed in his garret, see Le Grenier,
when a healthful and hopeful stripling. Nay,