I can only say that this negro was the noblest and gentlest man I ever met.  It needs more genius than I possess to praise him as he deserves; yet I hope the reputation of my pen is considerable enough to make his name survive to all ages, with that of the beautiful, brave, and constant Imoinda.

* * * * *

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

A Voyage to the Moon

Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac has recently acquired a new lease of fame as the hero of Edmond Rostand’s romantic comedy.  Probably he is better known in France as a fighter than as a wit and a poet.  Born about 1620, he entered the Regiment of the Guards in his nineteenth year, and quickly became renowned for his bravery.  He was an indefatigable duellist; when he was about twenty years old, he found a hundred men assembled to insult one of his friends, and he attacked them, killed two, mortally wounded seven, and dispersed all the rest.  He died at Paris in 1655, struck by a huge beam falling into the street.  As an author he was strangely underrated by his fellow-countrymen.  Moliere was the only man who really appreciated him.  For some centuries his works have been more esteemed in England than in France.  Many English writers, from Dean Swift to Samuel Butler, the author of “Erewhon,” have been inspired by his “Voyage to the Moon,” the English equivalent of the original title being, “Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun.”  This entertaining satire is as fresh as it was on the day it was written:  flying machines and gramophones, for instance, are curiously modern.  His inimitable inventiveness makes him the most delightful of French writers between Montaigne and Moliere.

I.—­Arrival on the Moon

After many experiments I constructed a flying machine, and, sitting on top of it, I boldly launched myself in the air from the crest of a mountain.  I had scarcely risen more than half a mile when something went wrong with my machine, and it shot back to the earth.  But, to my astonishment and joy, instead of descending with it, I continued to rise through the calm, moonlight air.  For three-quarters of an hour I mounted higher and higher.  Then suddenly all the weight of my body seemed to fall upon my head.  I was no longer rising quietly from the Earth, but tumbling headlong on to the Moon.  At last I crashed through a tree, and, breaking my fall among its leafy, yielding boughs, I landed gently on the grass below.

I found myself in the midst of a wild and beautiful forest, so full of the sweet music of singing-birds that it seemed as if every leaf on every tree had the tongue and figure of a nightingale.  The ground was covered with unknown, lovely flowers, with a magical scent.  As soon as I smelt it I became twenty years younger.  My thin grey hairs changed into thick, brown, wavy tresses; my wrinkled face grew fresh and rosy; and my blood flowed through my veins with the speed and vigour of youth.