even (as already intimated), the perishable
Old Coat, with the pile brushed off it and the
seams whitened by age, has a charm for him—
vide Mon Habit—becomes endeared to him
by the simple force of association. It is not,
however, we need scarcely add, by any means
exclusively to the celebration of littlenesses
even thus genially domestic, that Béranger
restricts his incomparable genius as a songwriter.
He has, on the contrary, sounded in
some sort the whole gamut of the Human
Passions, from the Treble to the Diapason.
Religion and Patriotism, Glory and Beauty,
Love and Friendship, have been his themes
alternately. And it would be difficult to say,
upon the instant, in which department of
song his Muse has proved the most eminently
successful.

His immense popularity can scarcely be
matter of surprise to us, when we remember
that others have, before now, been rewarded
with Fame for the production of a single
copy of verses. Not to allude more than
casually to Wolfe, as having secured
remembrance for his name in the world of letters
by his one solitary Elegy about Sir John
Moore at Corunna—precisely as Beckford
has, by Vathek alone, gained for himself no
fleeting reputation as a romancist—did not
the Lady Anne Barnard (God bless her!)
win renown by her single ballad of Auld
Robin Gray? Did not Rouget de Lisle,
the young artillery officer in the garrison
at Strasbourg, half-starved during the
scarcity of seventeen hundred and ninety-two,
flushed with wine and improvising to
the sound of his clavicord in the silence
and solitude of his barrack-chamber upon
one memorable midnight before that first
stormy dawn of the Great French Revolution
—did not Rouget de Lisle there and
then immortalise himself, in that one effort,
by the composition, the creation, rather be
it said, the rapturous revelation, of that
glorious Hymn of Revolt, the Marseillaise?
It is no marvel whatever, that, with
celebrity thus not unfrequently achieved
before now, by one single triumph on the part
of a song-writer, Béranger by so many
triumphs, triumphs so signal and so
reiterated, should have won for himself this
unrivalled popularity, and this all but
unparalleled reputation.

And this for the most part simply
because his marvellous lyrical genius was
throughout so perfectly truthful, so entirely
unaffected, so wholly natural and unstudied
in its manifestation. He never pretends or
exaggerates. What he thinks, he says—
what he feels, he expresses—he Is simply
what he appears To Be. His Muse, so to
speak, is never hysterical. His fun declares
itself, not in a roar of merriment, but in a
laughter like that of Old Fezziwig, who, we
are told, "laughed all over himself from his
shoes to his organ of benevolence." His
rage and his pathos have neither the howl
of a Cassandra, nor the shriek of a Deiphobe.
Rejoicing, sorrowing, believing, feeling, thinking,
in every way intensely—he is never in
extremes. Affectation, it may be said, was
his antithesis. He, we may be sure, could
never
             "Die of a rose in aromatic pain."

He would have inhaled its fragrance with a
sort of rapture, and then have stuck it jauntily
in his button-hole. And so the people
loved him—the man was so true at the same
time that he was so intense!

The purest love-songs of Béranger—alas!
that we should have to regret his occasionally
chanting licentious ditties to the zon-zon of
the flute and the violin—how exquisitely
delicate they are in their refined and
chastened tenderness! Loveliest of them all,
perhaps, the one in which he cries out
continually That she is beautiful, Qu'elle est
jolie! Pre-eminently above all his exhilarating
convivial songs, or Bacchanalians,
commend us to his jovial Trinquons, in which
he bids the whole world hob-nob socially
together! Trinquons! with its chinking
refrain, better even than the drinking chorus
of Mine Ancient in Othello.

                  "Et pour choquer,
                   Nous provoquer,
    Le verre en main, en rond nous attaquer,
      D'abord nous trinquerons pour boire,
      Et puis nous boirons pour trinquer."

Very freely translated thus:

                  "Cans we clatter,
                  Tables batter,
    Glass in hand, each other flatter:
      First of all we chink to drink,
      And presently we drink to chink!"

But what refrains they all are, the
wonderful refrains of Béranger; as provocative
of singing in unison to the voice of those
who listen, as the stirring sound of Scottish
dance-music ever proves to be an irresistible
incentive to movement among the feet of a
gathering of Highlanders. Listen to the close
of each verse of the Vivandière, with her
choral rub-a-dub—

          "Tintin, tintin, tintin, r'lin, tintin!"

Or hearken to his comically serious expostulation
with Grimalkin in his stanzas entitled
Ma Chatte (asking Pussy What ails her?)—

"Mia-mia-ou! Que veut Minette?"

Above all, sit silently, with a grave face, if
you can, while some friend from Over the
Water chuckles out the laughing refrain
of any one among the drollest of these chansons!
say, for example, that about The Little
Grey Man:

            "Qui dit: Moi, je m'en . . .
            Et dit: Moi, je m'en . . .
          Ma foi, moi, je m'en ris!
        Oh! qu'il est gai le petit homme gris!"

            "Who said: As for me . . .
            And said: As for me . . .