nthusiasm, some
harmony, a touch of genius; a certain dignity of imagination he
exhibits in his best moments. If we say that he honoured Buffon and
was the friend of Andre Chenier, we have said in his praise that which
gives him the highest distinction; yet it may be added that if he
often falsified the ode, he, like Rousseau, excelled in epigram. It
was not the great lyric but _le petit lyrisme_ which blossomed and
ran to seed in the thin poetic soil. The singers of fragile loves
and trivial pleasures are often charming, and as often they are merely
frivolous or merely depraved. Grecourt; Piron; Bernard, the curled
and powdered Anacreon; Bernis, Voltaire's "Babet la Bouquetiere,"
King Frederick's poet of "sterile abundance"; Dorat, who could
flutter at times with an airy grace; Bertin, born in the tropics,
and with the heat of the senses in his verse; Parny, an estray in
Paris from the palms and fountains of the Isle Bourbon, the "dear
Tibullus" of Voltaire--what a swarm of butterflies, soiled or
shining!

If two or three poets deserve to be distinguished from the rest, one
is surely JEAN-BAPTISTE-LOUIS GRESSET (1709-77), whose parrot
_Vert-Vert_, instructed by the pious Sisters, demoralised by the
boatmen of the Loire, still edifies and scandalises the lover of happy
badinage in verse; one is the young and unfortunate
NICOLAS-JOSEPH-LAURENT GILBERT (1751-80), less unfortunate and less
gifted than the legend makes him, yet luckless enough and embittered
enough to become the satirist of Academicians and philosophers and
the society which had scorned his muse; and the third is JEAN-PIERRE
CLARIS DE FLORIAN (1755-94), the amiable fabulist, who, lacking La
Fontaine's lyric genius, fine harmonies, and penetrating good sense,
yet can tell a story with pleasant ease, and draw a moral with gentle
propriety.

In every poetic form, except comedy, that he attempted, Voltaire
stands high among his contemporaries; they give us a measure of his
range and excellence. But the two greatest poets of the eighteenth
century wrote in prose. Its philosophical poet was the naturalist
Buffon; its supreme lyrist was the author of _La Nouvelle Heloise_.

III

In the history of French tragedy only one name of importance--that
of Crebillon--is to be found in the interval between Racine and
Voltaire. Campistron feebly, Danchet formally and awkwardly,
imitated Racine; Duche followed him in sacred tragedy; La
Grange-Chancel (author of the _