century"--is an amazing chaos of extravagance, incompetence, and
genius; it bears to Hugo's _Legende des Siecles_ the relation which
the megatherium or mastodon may bear to some less monstrous analogues.

If we are to look for a presentiment of Lamartine's poetry, we may
find it in the harmonious melancholy of Chenedolle, in the grace of
Fontanes' stanzas, in the timid elegiac strains of Millevoye. The
special character of the poetry of the Empire lies in its combination
of the tradition derived from the eighteenth century, with a certain
reaching-forth to an ideal, by-and-by to be realised, which it could
not attain. Its comparative sterility is not to be explained solely
or chiefly by the vigilance of the imperial censure of publications.
The preceding century had lost the large feeling for composition,
for beauty and severity of form; attention was fixed upon details.
If invention ceased to create, it must necessarily trick out what
was commonplace in ingenuities of decorative periphrasis. Literature
in the eighteenth century had almost ceased to be art, and had become
a social and political weapon; under the imperial rule this militant
function was withdrawn; what remained for literature but frigid
ambitions or petty adornments, until a true sense of art was once
again recovered?

The Revolution closed the _salons_ and weakened the influence of
cultivated society upon literature. Journalism and the pamphlet
filled the place left vacant by the _salons_. The _Decade
Philosophique_ was the organ of the ideologists, who applied the
conceptions of Condillac and his followers to literary and
philosophical criticism. In 1789 the _Journal des Debats_ was founded.
Much ardour of feeling, much vigour of intellect was expended in the
columns of the public press. Among the contributors were Andre Chenier,
Mallet du Pin, Suard, Rivarol. With a little ink and a guillotine,
Camille Desmoulins hoped to render France happy, prosperous, and
republican. Heady, vain, pleasure-loving, gay, bitter, sensitive,
with outbreaks of generosity and moments of elevation, he did
something to redeem his crimes and follies by pleas for justice and
mercy in his journal, _Le Vieux Cordelier_, and died, with Danton
as his companion, after a frenzy of resistance and despair.

The orators of the Revolution glorified doctrinaire abstractions,
overflowed with sentimental humanity, and decorated their harangues
with heroic examples of Roman virtue. The