He spent the last years of his life with an old friend of his youth by the name of Madame Judith.  This worthy person died a few months before him, and he accompanied her remains to the church.  He was seventy-seven years old when he died.

Estimating and comparing chiefly literary and poetic merits, some persons in France have been astonished that the obsequies of Beranger should have been so magnificently celebrated, while, but a few months before, the coffin of another poet, M. Alfred de Musset, had been followed by a mere handful of mourners; yet M. de Musset was capable of tones and flights which in inspiration and ardor surpassed the habitual range of Beranger.  Without attempting here to institute a comparison, there is one thing essential to be remarked:  in Beranger there was not only a poet, but a man, and the man in him was more considerable than the poet,—­the reverse of what is the case with so many others.  People went to see him, after having heard his songs sung, to tell him how much they had been applauded and enjoyed,—­and, after the first compliments, found that the poet was a man of sense, a good talker on all subjects, interested in politics, a wonderful reasoner, with great knowledge of men, and characterizing them delicately with a few fine and happy touches.  They became sincerely attached to him; they came again, and delighted to draw out in talk that wisdom armed with epigram, that experience full of agreeable counsels.  His passions had been the talent of the poet; his good sense gave authority to the man.  Even by those least willing to accept popular idols, Beranger will always be ranked as one of the subtilest wits of the French school, and as something more than this,—­as one of the acutest servants of free human thought.

A TIFFIN OF PARAGRAPHS.

How runs the Hindoo saw?  “Are we not to milk when there is a cow?” When India is giving down generous streams of paragraphy to all the greedy buckets of the press, shall we not hold our pretty pail under?  As our genial young friend, Ensign Isnob, of the “Sappies and Minors,” would say,—­“I believe you, me boy!”

Then come with us to Cossitollah, and we’ll have a tiffin of talk; some cloves of adventure, with a capsicum or two of tragic story, shall stand for the curry; the customs of the country may represent the familiar rice; a whiff of freshness and fragrance from the Mofussil will be as the mangoes and the dorians; in the piquancy and grotesqueness of the first pure Orientalism that may come to hand we shall recognize the curious chow-chow of the chutney; and as for the beer,—­why, we will be the beer ourselves.

“Kitmudgar, remove that scorpion from the punka, before it drops into the Sahib’s plate.—­Hold, miscreant! who told you to kill it?

  “’Take it up tenderly,
  Lift it with care,—­
  Fashioned so slenderly,
  Young, and so fair!’