And since that time there has been in the French journals nothing but a succession of hymns to the memory of Beranger, hymns scarcely interrupted by now and then some cooler and soberer judgments.  People have vied with each other in making known his good deeds done in secret, his gifts,—­we will not call them alms,—­for when he gave, he did not wish that it should have the character of alms, but of a generous, brotherly help.  Numbers of his private letters have been printed; and one of his disciples has published recollections of his conversations, under the title of Memoires de Beranger.  The same disciple, once a simple artisan, a shoemaker, we believe, M. Savinien Lapointe, has also composed Le petit Evangile de la Jeunesse de Beranger.  M. de Lamartine, in one of the numbers of his Cours familier de Litterature, has devoted two hundred pages to an account of Beranger and a commentary on him, and has recalled curious conversations which he had with him in the most critical political circumstances of the Revolution of 1848.  In short, there has been a rivalry in developing and amplifying the memory of the national songster, treating him as Socrates was once treated,—­bringing up all his apophthegms, reproducing the dialogues in which he figured,—­going even farther,—­carrying him to the very borders of legend, and evidently preparing to canonize in him one of the Saints in the calendar of the future.

What is there solid in all this?  How much is legitimate, and how much excessive?  Beranger himself seems to have wished to reduce things to their right proportions, having left behind him ready for publication two volumes:  one being a collection of his last poems and songs; the other an extended notice, detailing the decisive circumstances of his poetic and political life, and entitled “My Biography.”

The collection of his last songs, let us say it frankly, has not answered expectation.  In reading them, we feel that the poet has grown old, that he is weary.  He complains continually that he has no longer any voice,—­that the tree is dead,—­that even the echo of the woods answers only in prose,—­that the source of song is dried up; and says, prettily,—­

  “If Time still make the clock run on,
  He makes it strike no longer.”

And unhappily he is right.  We find here and there pretty designs, short felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the reading and take away all its charm.  Even the pieces most highly lauded in advance, and which celebrate some of the most inspiring moments in the life of Napoleon,—­such as his Baptism, his Horoscope cast by a Gypsy, and others,—­have neither sparkle nor splendor.  The prophet is not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm.  On the theme of Napoleon, Victor Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France