But still more desperate th'attempt to mould Had lost the hope, though it preserved the will. Then with no books but thine my hands were fraught ; Hovering before me, raised my drooping powers. True is, the blaze of that exceeding light, Thou chiefly, noble spirit, for whose loss Didst hope some fruitage from those buds of mine; The Muses' sacred hill; nor only lend Example, but inspirit me to reach The far-off summit by thy friendly speech: May gracious Heaven, O! honour of our age, Meanwhile accept, if aught thou deign of ours, This warm and affectionate admiration of the two poets who then divided the homage of their countrymen, Ronsard and Desportes, does great credit to Bertaut. His hope of being easily able to imitate the sweetness of the latter, his failure in the attempt, his then turning to Ronsard as his model, the encouragement given to him by both, and the de votedness and reverence with which he regarded every thing that related to men who in his estimation were of so great importance,-all this is told with an earnestness which makes it impossible to doubt its truth. There is not one other of his sonnets in the first volume that is expressed with so much nature and grace as the following:- Au Monseigneur le Cardinal de Bourbon, au Nom des Habitans de Bourgucil. Où tout est par le feu destruit et saccagé, De l'aise et du repos ou vous nous faites vivre. To my Lord the Cardinal of Bourbon, in the Name of the Inhabitants of Bourgueil. Whilst we behold thee sojourn in a land, Whose breast the track of livid fire hath scored, At p. 238 of the first volume, is Timandre, Poeme, contenant une tragique Aventure. This tragical adventure, intended to show the ill effects of trusting in those who deal with familiar spirits, is related with much fluency of numbers, and a style remarkable for its familiarity and ease. The second volume, which contains his love-poems, none but a lover could have patience to read to the end. Like those of Desportes, or of our own Cowley, they present us with the idea of no living object. The fancied mistress seems to be nothing more than a web stretched out on the warp for the purpose of embroidering the poet's conceits; and of these, many are the mere sports of an idle ingenuity, which have no concern either with the imagination or the heart: such is the description of her hand :— Quant à sa belle main, ceste vive merveille, L'une commet le meurtre, et l'autre le defend. V. 2. p. 5. As to her beautiful hand, that living wonder, which renders Love the possessor of my freedom, it might be said to be without an equal in the world, if heaven had condemned it not to have a sister: but for my double misfortune it was born a twin, and both framed of a marble that is endowed with motion, and cleft into ten branches: the one is the committer of the theft, and the other its concealer; the one perpetrates the murder, and the other defends it. The following stanzas will supply future commentators with a parallel passage to the well-known apothegm in Shakspeare: Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues Men's wrongs alone in mind we bear; Their injuries we in metal grave, And write their kindness in the wave. Love can a proof of this supply, Who mingles pleasure with his pain: The good we pass in silence by, And only of the ill complain. A pretty conceit of Waller's is to be found in Bertaut. That eagle's fate and mine are one, Which on the shaft that made him die Espy'd a feather of his own, Wherewith he wont to soar so high. Waller.-To a Lady singing Non, non, rien que notre manie Qui se plaint de sa tyrannie, Se plaint d'avoir faute de coeur. a Song of his composing. Nous seuls brassons les amertumes Dont il paist nos coeurs insensez; Nostre oysiveté le fait naistre : He doth of us blind homage claim; In one of his sonnets we have the same thought as in those stanzas of Shenstone, on which Johnson has pronounced that the mind which denies them its sympathy has no acquaintance with love or nature. Je meurs me souvenant que sa bouche de basme, D'un baiser redoublé qui me déroba l'ame, En me disant adieu me pria du retour. So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return. The only poem in which I have observed anything like an attempt to describe the person of his Amarantha, is termed an Elegy (p. 66), where he introduces Love appearing to him, after he had forsworn his affection for Chloris, and resolved to secure himself from similar engagements by in addition to his usual weapons, the the study of astronomy. The God, bow and the quiver, has a roll of paper in one of his hands, and expostulates in a sarcastic vein with the rebel, on his intentions: Et bien, jeune astrologue, à la fin ta pensée The poet replies, that the ingratitude and cruelty of Chloris had made him resolute to persevere in the course he had taken. On this, Love seems to allow the justice of his plea; but argues that he is not to give over the chase, because the prey has once escaped him; that the mariner, who has suffered shipwreck, again puts to sea; and the labourer, whose hopes of a harvest have failed, still continues to commit his seed to the earth: and, when Bertaut persists in his contumacy, ends by unfolding the paper: this he was Jean Bertaut was born in 1552, at Caen in Normandy, a province where the poetry of France may be said to have originated under the auspices of its English sovereigns, or, to speak more properly, the Norman sovereigns of England; and which has since continued to support the honours it had so early acquired. He was the First Almoner to Queen Catherine de Medici. By Henry III. made Private Secretary, Reader, and Councillor of State. Henry IV. who was induced partly by his arguments or persuasion to conform to the church establishment of France, gave him the Abbey of Aunay in 1594; and in 1606 appointed him Bishop of Sees in Normandy. Besides the poems already mentioned, he made a translation of the Second Book of the Eneid, inserted in the collection of his poems, and a translation or paraphrase of the Psalms into French verse, which is not among them, and which was perhaps not made till after he became a bishop. He died in 1611, at the age of fifty-nine. PS. Friend Janus, who has bantered me so pleasantly on my scholarship,* may perhaps hope, that in arriving at Bertaut I have nearly reached the end of my obliquity. I hope the Printer did not put the word by mistake for obloquy, and the Editor kindly pass the opáλua sub silentio. Obliquity, however, it was printed; and I am willing to understand the word as applied to a kind of zodiac, through which I have been travelling, and of which I did indeed seem to myself nearly to have attained the limit, when certain other luminaries sprang up to invite me onwards. To drop the figure for a moment, and explain myself;-I had almost exhausted the materials derived from the old library in France, when another treasure of the same kind, in this country, was unexpectedly laid open to me by the kindness and liberality of its possessor. I must, therefore, entreat Janus, and in him all others who retain the hatred of the old Roman deity (after whom he was probably named) to the Gauls, that they will yet bear with me while I persevere a little longer in this Loxian course. I have heard it said,-and they were no fools who said it,-that the romance of life was over, that the days of adventure were gone by; but how can this be, when so many volumes, quarto, octavo, and duodecimo, give the lie direct to the assertion? Every body now has his adventures; and they who cannot find monsters at home, contrive to make them in a twelvemonth's tour of the continent. There is no fatigue that a genuine tourist will not endure for the sake of talking of it afterwards, and if he is not lucky enough to meet with any robbers, he is sure to hear of them, which answers his purpose every jot as well; nay, I once had a friend, who, having travelled a whole year to no purpose, flung himself in despair into the English river Thames, but by some singular acci dent swam to shore instead of sinking, and afterwards wrote a pretty account, a very pretty account indeed, of his drowning and subsequent recovery to life. For my own part, however, I have been more fortunate; |