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MELLIN DE SAINT GELAIS.

MELLIN de Saint Gelais is commended by Joachim du Bellay, in that poet's address to the reader prefixed to his own works, for having been the first who distinguished himself as a writer of sonnets in the French language. He left only seventeen of them. At least, I find no more in the collection of his poems,

published soon after his decease. But it was a prolific race, and in a short time multiplied exceedingly.

Two out of these seventeen will, I dare say, satisfy the reader as to quantity. And for the quality, I can assure him they are not the worst of the batch.

Il n'est point tant de barques à Venise,
D'huistres à Bourg, de lievres en Champaigne,
D'ours en Savoye, et de veaux en Bretaigne,
De Cygnes blancs le long de la Tamise,
Ne tant d'Amours si traitent en l'Eglise,
De differents aux peuples d'Alemaigne,
Ne tant de gloire à un Seigneur d'Espaigne,
Ne tant si trouve à la Cour de faintise,
Ne tant y a de monstres en Afrique,

D'opinions en une Republique,

Ne de pardons à Romme aux jours de feste,
Ne d'avarice aux hommes de pratique,

Ne d'argumens en une Sorbonique,

Que m' amie a de lunes en la teste.

Oeuvres Poëtiques de Mellin de S. Gelais. Lyon. Par Antoine de
Harsy, 1574, p. 84.

So many barks are not for Venice bound;

Nor oysters, Bourg can show; or calves, Bretagne ;

Or Savoy, bears; or leverets, Champagne;

Or Thamis, silver swans, his shores around:
Not amorous treaties so at church abound,
Or quarrels in the Diet of Almaine,
Not so much boasting in a Don of Spain,
Not so much feigning at the Court is found:
Monsters so numerous hath not Africa,

Nor minds so various a republic bred,
Nor pardons are at Rome on holyday,
Or cravings underneath a lawyer's gown,
Or reas'nings with the doctors of Sorbonne ;
As there are lunes in my sweet lady's head.
De Monsieur le Dauphin.

Vous que second la noble France honore,
Pouvez cueillir par ces prés florissans,
Oeillets pour vous seul s'espanouissans,
Esclos ensemble avec la belle Aurore,
Pour vostre front le rosier se collore,

Dont les chapeaux si haut lieu congnoissans,
Forment boutons de honte rougissans,
Sachant que mieux vous appartient encore.

Ceinte de liz la blanche Galathee

Ses fruits vous garde en deux paniers couverts,
L'un d'olivier, l'autre de laurier verds.

Ainsi chantoit des Nymphes escoutee

La belle Eglé dont Pan oyant le son,

Du grand Henry l'appella la chanson. (P. 87.)
On the Dauphin.

Thou, who art second in our noble France,
Mayst cull at will, along each blooming mead,
These pinks, whose hues for thee alone are spread,
First opening with the morning's early glance;

For thee the rose-bush doth his top advance,
Whose coronals, with buttons vermeil-red,
Blush all for shame to hold so high their head,
Trusting yet more thy pleasure to enhance.
The milk-white Galathea, lily-crown'd,

For thee in panniers twain her fruits doth screen,
One veil'd with olive, one with myrtle green.
Thus sang fair Ægle, while the nymphs around
Smiled as they listen'd; and Pan heard the song,
And to great Harry bade the notes belong.

The Sonnet was not the only form of composition adopted by Saint Gelais from the Italian tongue. He borrowed from it the Ottava Rima also.

In the Chant Villanesque (p. 235) he has counterfeited the charm of a rustic simplicity with much skill.

Mellin was supposed to be the natural son of Octavien de Saint Gelais, Sieur de Lunsac, and Bishop of Angoulême, and was born in 1491. The father, besides his own original works, among which the Vergier d'Honneur was one, was the Author of Translations into French verse of the Eneid, several books of the Odyssey, and the Epistles and Ars

Amandi of Ovid. His profession did not restrain him from much freedom both in his life and writings. He is said to have bestowed great pains on his son's education, who profited as well as could be hoped under such a guide and tutor; for he learnt to write verses better than his father, but with a sufficient portion of ribaldry in them. Mellin had a high reputation in the courts of Francis I. and Henry II. He was abbot of Recluz, and royal almoner and librarian.

A copy of verses directed to Clement Marot (p. 176) when they were both in ill health, shows his regard for that poet. It begins,

Gloire et regret des Poetes de France,
Clement Marot, ton ami Sainct Gelais,
Autant marri de ta longue souffrance,

Comme ravi de tes doux chants et lais, &c.

Glory and regret of the poets of France, Clement Marot; thy friend Saint Gelais, who is as much grieved by thy long suffering, as he is charmed by thy songs, and lays, &c.

Both he and Clement celebrated the restoration of Laura's tomb, at Avignon, by Francis I.

He addresses also Hugues Salel, of whom we shall soon hear more; though they had not yet made an acquaintance with each other.

His conduct towards Ronsard was somewhat ungenerous; but that poet, with his characteristic generosity, forgave more than once the ill offices

which Saint Gelais was supposed to have done him at court.

His talent for epigrammatic satire was so much dreaded, that "Gare à la tenaille de Saint Gelais;" "'Ware of Saint Gelais pincers," became a proverbial saying.

He was celebrated for his skill in Latin poetry, and composed the following verses, when near his end.

Barbite, qui varios lenisti pectoris æstus,
Dum juvenem nunc sors, nunc agitabat amor;
Perfice ad extremum, rapidæque incendia febris
Qua potes infirmo fac leviora seni.

Certe ego te faciam, superas evectus ad auras,

Insignem ad Cytharæ sidus habere locum.

Harp, that didst soothe my cares, when opening life

With love and fortune waged alternate strife,

Fulfil thy task: allay the fervid rage

Of fever preying on my feeble age;

So, when I reach the skies, a place shall be,

Near the celestial lyre, allotted thee.

He died at Paris, in 1559. His works were re-edited, with additions, in that city, in 1719; as I find in De Bure's Bibliographie.

HYMN TO SPRING.

THOU virgin bliss the seasons bring,
Thou yet beloved in vain ;

I long to hail thee, gentle Spring,
And meet thy face again.

That rose-bud cheek, that sunlit eye,
Those locks of fairest hue,

Which zephyrs wave each minute by
And show thy smiles anew.

Oh! how I wait thy reign begun,
To gladden earth and skies;

When, threaten'd with a warmer sun,
The sullen Winter flies;

When songs are sung from every tree,
When bushes bud to bowers,

When plains a carpet spread for thee,
And strew thy way with flowers.

Ah! I do long that day to see
When, near a fountain side,
I loiter hours away by thee,
With beauty gratified;

To look upon those eyes of blue
Whose light is of the sky,
And that unearthly face to view
Which love might deify.

I long to press that glowing breast,
Whose softness might suffice

As pillow for an angel's rest,
And still be paradise.

And, oh! I wait those smiles to see,

To me, to nature, given;

Smiles stol'n from joy's eternity,

Whence mortals taste of heaven.

Oh! urge the surly Winter by,
Nor let him longer live;

Whose suns creep shyly down the sky
And grudge the light they give.

Oh! bring thy suns, and brighter days,
Which, lover-like, delight

To hasten on their morning ways,
And loth retire at night.

Oh! hasten on, thou lovely Spring;

Bid Winter frown in vain:

Thy mantle o'er thy shoulders bring,

And choose an early reign.

Thy herald flower, in many a place,

The daisy, joins with me;

While chill winds nip his crimpled face,

He smiles in hopes of thee.

Then come; and while my heart is warm,

To sing thy pleasures new,

Led onward by thy lovely arm

I'll hie me through the dew;

Or meet thy noon-day's sober wind

Thy rearing flowers to see,

And weave a wreath, of those I find,
To Nature and to Thee.

JOHN CLARE.

44

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Leisure Hours.

LEISURE HOURS.

No. V.

Introductory to a Translation from the Homeric Hymns.

ON THE ENGLISH STANDARD HEROIC:
WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.

I REMEMBER a little book, aiming
at a great deal of precision and attain-
ing to a good deal of dryness, (bre-
vis esse laboro, obscurus fio) entitled
"Les beaux arts réduits à un même
principe." It was written by Bat-
teux, a member of the French Aca-
demy, who, they say, died of a bro-
ken heart, because his "Cours Ele-
mentaire for the military school
(in forty-five volumes; mercy on us!)
did not succeed. In this treatise on
the fine arts, (which, I recollect, in-
cludes "La danse,"-a truly na-
tional classification) he endeavours to
show that the Greeks and Latins
possessed no real advantage over the
moderns in the admeasurement of
their verse by regulated quantities:
and he adduces the instance-

Semotique prius tarda necessitas, Lethi corripuit gradum. contending that if the dactylic harmony of corripuit gradum be expressive, the harmony of tarda necessitas must be misplaced, and by consequence faulty. It is not easy to answer this: and it appears certain that the Greeks and Latins by leaving four feet out of the six optional, felt the difficulty, and were more attentive to the time than the foot; to the rhythm than the metre. The object of the writer is to prove that the mere sound of the words, syllables, or even letters, and the greater or less distinctness of the cadences,* produce equivalent results in modern versification, (as for instance, in the concert between the sound and the object of thought) to those effected by the quantities of the ancient metres. It is well observed by Batteux that, " languages are not made by system, and since they have their source in human nature itself, they must in a variety of points resemble It follows that there each other." will seldom be found a deficiency in

any language without a compensa-
tion: that if a language has not the
same laws of harmony as another,
the laws peculiar to itself will sup-
ply the same resources and operate
the same effects, in relation to the
ear native to that language, as are
arbitrarily and unphilosophically
thought to depend on the adaptation
of particular and exclusive means.
The musical expression of modern
verse is not less genuine and founded
in nature, than that of ancient verse,
although in the latter, the means, by
which the harmonical effect is attain-
ed, are more instantly obvious, and
harmony appears more reduced into
a system. The verse in Athalia,
Tout l'univers est plein de sa magnificence
has a perceptibly graver march than
this in Esther:

Jeunes et tendres fleurs, par le sort agitées.
When Milton speaks of the river of
life, which-

Rolls o'er Elysian flowers its amber stream, the English ear is soothed with a as satisfying and real as was persensible smoothness of melody, quite ceived by the ear of a Roman in the line of Virgil,

Floreat, irriguumque bibant violaria fon

tem.

It follows that were it practicable to amalgamate the laws of one language with those of another, or to ingraft the Latin harmony of quantities, by a sort of factitious assimilation and associative effort of the memory, upon the harmony which results from emphatic accentuation merely, (in addition, be it understood, to the rhythmical proportion of syllabical arrangement) the work would be one of supererogation. The attempt is, in my judgment, hopeless, as to any purpose of real melody at least, even if we allow

Notwithstanding the unemphatic character of the French language, and the appa rent equable stress on the syllables which make up their complement of twelve times, to a French ear some cadences are more sensible than others.

that the general effect of harmony can be made perceptible to the ear. We have indeed syllables naturally long and others naturally short; and some will slide easily enough into a dactylic combination; as in the verse of the "Vision of Judgment,"

Green ǎs ǎ stream in the glen whose pure

and chrysolite wātērs:

but if a few of our weak syllables are thus complying, others are no less intractable: and the dactyls, in numerous lines of the poem, can only be analysed by dint of somewhat desperate scanning and proving. It is not always easy to detect which are the dactyls and which are the spondees; and the same syllables, the weak vowels for instance, are forced to do double duty: they are both long and short, alternately, according to the sic volo, sic jubeo, of the poet. It is plain, that to the popular eye and ear, such measures can contain no more distinguishable properties of symmetrical sound than Lowth's version of Isaiah; which is only not prose because it is distributed into verse-like lines: while to the learned, accustomed to the copiously diversified metre of Virgil (who, by the bye did not begin every line with a jumping dactyl) the impression conveyed must be that of a systematic violation of every principle of true harmony. The attempt is like the "yoking of foxes." If" the Vision of Judgment" had not offered as striking a contrast as is well conceivable, in all other respects besides rhythm, to the "Joan of Arc," the weight of its lame feet were fully sufficient to prevent it from soaring: corpus onustum Hexametris vitiis animam quoque prægra

vat unà.

Batteux was clearly right in insisting that the modern language possessed equivalents to the advantages of the ancient, and in avoiding to recommend a direct and mechanical imitation of their measures; which is substituting the mimickry of the mocking bird for musical passion. We may demonstrate the same truth by examples drawn from our own poets, as he has done by instances from his:

our heroic alexandrine (of which more by and bye) may compete with the Homeric hexameter in copiousness of harmony; the metre of Collins in the "the Ode to Evening" supplies us with an adequate English alcaic; and the adonic of Sappho is rallels in the lyrical poetry of Burns. equalled in its effect by repeated pa

What Mr. Southey perhaps felt was a dissatisfaction at the confined compass and homotonous character of the English standard heroic. It has little of extent in scale, or body in sound; and is too slender to represent adequately the epic verse of the ancients. It seems to rank in dignity little above the Phaedrian iambics. The old writers of rhymed couplets, and the best writers of blank verse in succeeding eras, (by which I mean the versifiers on the model of Milton and Akenside) imitate with success the ancient involution of period by prolonging the pause in the sense and shifting it through alternate lines; but the single verses are deficient in grandiloquence of harcontinuous and comprehensive line is mony: and the advantage of a more possessed by our neighbours, though we persist in voting it anapæstic, in the teeth of the prolonged and measured recitation of the French actors.

It must be admitted that our bre

vity of measure is in some degree compensated by our affluence, if such it may be called, in monosyllabic words. We are thus enabled to condense more matter; but something at the expense of rhythmical richness and sonorous harmony. Sweetness and force, indeed, are often attained by verses wholly consisting in monosyllables. I shall offer some examples of this from a writer, who, from his having employed a similar structure of versification to that of Pope, is often inconsiderately ranked with him as an unfaithful and inefficient translator; but who, on the contrary, even when most paraphrastical, has seized with singular happiness and power the sort of pathos and declamatory energy which characterize his original. The following verses,

collected

Pope stigmatizes them as necessarily nerveless and mean: yet one of the best. couplets he ever wrote is made up of little else:

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