no recourse being had to the older tongue for picturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, however appropriate and distinct.  In the second place, the adoption, especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech, describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and avoiding direct and simple terms.  Thirdly, in all forms of literature, but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kind of work of cut-and-dried patterns,[15] to which it was bound to conform.  We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry, such as fables, epistles, odes, etc.  Each piece was expected to resemble something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and insufficient culture.  Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one monotonous model.  Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to a very few classes and kinds.”  If to this description be added a paragraph from Gautier’s “Histoire du Romantisme,” we shall have a sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the appearance of Victor Hugo’s “Odes et Ballades” (1826).  “One cannot imagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature had come.  Painting was not much better.  The last pupils of David were spreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns.  The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from putting their hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however, that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the new school, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with a drunken broom.”  One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury’s summary of many features which we have observed in the English academicism of the eighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, e.g., which makes itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other old authors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of the periphrasis—­the “gelid cistern,” the “stercoraceous heap,” the “spiculated palings,” and the “shining leather that encased the limb.”  And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to the French alexandrine.  In their dissatisfaction with the paleness and vagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classical verse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even argot or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts.  Gautier mentions in particular one Theophile Dondey (who, after the fashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothee