numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the Remains of Beranger, if one chose to institute a comparison.  We may well say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse; one gains no honor by the experiment.  Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it seems to be more difficult.

But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Beranger, the Beranger of the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again; and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now imperfectly known.  He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780; and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that “Paris had not to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most sympathy.”  He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,—­one of the noisiest of the Parisian streets, famous for its restaurants and the number of oysters consumed in them.  “Seeing me born,” he says, “in one of the dirtiest and noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods, fields, flowers, and birds so much?” It is true that Beranger loved them,—­but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and child of the Rue Montorgueil.  A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden, a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside wheat-fields,—­these were enough for him.  His Muse, we feel, has never journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the ocean, or the illimitable prairie.  Lamartine, born in the country, amid all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his, and to say to him, “I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born among citizens, among proletaries.”  Beranger loved the country as people love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs.  How different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has sometimes been compared!  But, on the other hand, Beranger loved the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the ouvrier, industrious, intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate, with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas.  He loved him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his songs.  Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned his love.