s
which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less
extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose
specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion,
a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project
was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to
the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase,
following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the
original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its
barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London
and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the
_milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered
him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating
_rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him
that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French.
"I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than
the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France
with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to
explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made
him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the
French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great
Shakspere translation never materialised; but Francois-Victor Hugo, the
second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles
of translation in his version of Shakspere.

Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Celestin Nanteuil,
who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written
to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square
of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme
Moyen-age, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a
_retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born
in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Duerer. Celestin Nanteuil "had the air
of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the
_sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to
have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his
nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the
least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole i