knows but we might have heard of his patrimony! who knows but our venerable popes might have claimed dominion from him, as descendant from the kings of Rome!

La Fontaine. Make it out. Rochefoucault. I have pointed out to him at what passes he hath deviated from his true interest, and where he hath mistaken selfishness for generosity, coldness for judgment, contraction of heart for policy, rank for merit, pomp for dignity; of all mistakes, the commonest and the greatest. I am accused of paradox and distortion. On paradox I shall only say, that every new moral truth has been called so. Inexperienced and negligent observers see no difference in the operations of raveling and unraveling: they never come close enough : they despise plain work.

La Fontaine. The more we simplify things, the better we descry their substances and qualities. A good writer will not coil them up and press them into the narrowest possible space, nor macerate them into such particles that nothing shall be remaining of their natural contexture. You are accused of this too, by such as have forgotten your title-page, and who look for treatises where maxims only have been promised. Some of them perhaps are spinning out sermons and dissertations from the poorest paragraph in the volume.

Rochefoucault. Let them copy and write as they please; against or for, modestly or impudently. I have hitherto had no assailant who is not of too slender a make to be detained an hour in the stocks he has unwarily put his foot into. If you hear of any, do not tell of them. On the subjects of my remarks, had others thought as I do, my labour would have been spared me. I am ready to point out the road where I know it, to whosoever wants it ; but I walk side by side with few or none.

La Fontaine. We usually like those roads which show us the fronts of our friends' houses and the pleasure-grounds about them, and the smooth garden-walks, and the trim espaliers, and look at them with more satisfaction than at the docks and nettles that are thrown in heaps behind. The Offices of Cicero are imperfect; yet who would not rather guide his children by them than by the line and compass of harder-handed guides; such as Hobbes for instance?

Rochefoucault. Imperfect as some gentlemen in hoods may call the Offices, no founder of a philosophical or of a religious sect has been able to add to them anything important.

La Fontaine. Pity! that Cicero carried with him no better authorities than reason and humanity. He neither could work miracles, nor damn you for disbelieving them. Had he lived fourscore years later, who knows but he might have been another Simon Peter, and have talked

Rochefoucault. The hint, some centuries ago, would have made your fortune, and that saintly cat there would have kittened in a mitre.

La Fontaine. Alas! the hint could have done nothing: Cicero could not have lived later.

Roche foucault. I warrant him. Nothing is easier to correct than chronology. There is not a lady in Paris, nor a jockey in Normandy, that is not eligible to a professor's chair in it. I have seen a man's ancestor, whom nobody ever saw before, spring back over twenty generations. Our Vatican Jupiters have as little respect for old Chronos as the Cretan had: they mutilate him when and where they think necessary, limp as he may by the operation.

La Fontaine. When I think, as you make me do, how ambitious men are, even those whose teeth are too loose (one would fancy) for a bite at so hard an apple as the devil of ambition offers them, I am inclined to believe that we are actuated not so much by selfishness as you represent it, but under another form, the love of power. Not to speak of territorial dominion or political office, and such other things as we usually class under its appurtenances, do we not desire an exclusive control over what is beautiful and lovely? the possession of pleasant fields, of well, situated houses, of cabinets, of images, of pictures, and indeed of many things pleasant to see but useless to possess; even of rocks, of streams, and of fountains? These things, you will tell me, have their utility. True, but not to the wisher, nor does the idea of it enter his mind. Do not we wish that the object of our love should be devoted to us only; and that our children should love us better than their brothers and sisters, or even than the mother who bore them? Love would be arrayed in the purple robe of sovranty, mildly as he may resolve to exercise his power.

Rochefoucault. Many things which appear to be incontrovertible, are such for their age only, and must yield to others which, in their age, are equally so. There are only a few points that are always above the waves. Plain truths, like plain dishes, are commended by everybody, and everybody leaves them whole. If it were not even more impertinent and presumptuous to praise a great writer in his presence than to censure him in his absence, I would venture to say that your prose, from the few specimens you have given of it, is equal to your verse. Yet, even were I the possessor of such a style as yours, I would never employ it to support my Maxims. You would think a writer very impudent and self-sufficient who should quote his own works: to defend them is doing more. We are the worst auxiliaries in the world to the opinions we have brought into the field. Our business is, to measure the ground,

and to calculate the forces; then let them try their strength. If the weak assails me, he thinks me weak; if the strong, he thinks me strong. He is more likely to compute ill his own vigour than mine. At all events, I love inquiry, even when I myself sit down. And I am not offended in my walks if my visitor asks me whither does that alley lead? It proves that he is ready to go on with me; that he sees some space before him; and that he believes there may be something worth looking after.

La Fontaine. You have been standing a long time, my lord duke: I must entreat you to be seated.

of dignity, let me tell you, a dog accepts the subsidies of his friends, but never claims them: a dog would not take the field to obtain power for a son, but would leave the son to obtain it by his own activity and prowess. He conducts his visitor or inmate out a-hunting, and makes a present of the game to him as freely as an emperor to an elector. Fond as he is of slumber, which is indeed one of the pleasantest and best things in the universe, particularly after dinner, he shakes it off as willingly as he would a gadfly, in order to defend his master from theft or violence. Let the robber or assailant speak as courteously as he may, he waives your diplomatical terms, gives his

La Fontaine. Mercy on us! have you been upon your legs ever since you rose to leave me? Rochefoucault. A change of position is agreeable a friend always permits it.

La Fontaine. Sad doings! sad oversight! The other two chairs were sent yesterday evening to be scoured and mended. But that dog is the best-tempered dog! an angel of a dog, I do assure you; he would have gone down in a moment, at a word. I am quite ashamed of myself for such inattention. With your sentiments of friendship for me, why could you not have taken the liberty to shove him gently off, rather than give me this uneasiness?

Rochefoucault. My true and kind friend! we authors are too sedentary; we are heartily glad of standing to converse, whenever we can do it without any restraint on our acquaintance.

La Fontaine. I must reprove that animal when he uncurls his body. He seems to be dreaming of Paradise and Houris. Ay, twitch thy ear, my child! I wish at my heart there were as troublesome a fly about the other: God forgive me! The rogue covers all my clean linen! shirt and cravat! what cares he!

Rochefoucault. Dogs are not very modest.

La Fontaine. Never say that, M. de la Rochefoucault! The most modest people upon earth! Look at a dog's eyes; and he half-closes them, or gently turns them away, with a motion of the lips, which he licks languidly, and of the tail, which he stirs tremulously, begging your forbearance. I am neither blind nor indifferent to the defects of these good and generous creatures. They are subject to many such as men are subject to: among the rest, they disturb the neighbourhood in the discussion of their private causes; they quarrel and fight on small motives, such as a little bad food, or a little vain-glory, or the sex. But it must be something present or near that excites them; and they calculate not the extent of evil they may do or suffer.

Rochefoucault. Certainly not: how should dogs calculate?

La Fontaine. I know nothing of the process. I am unable to inform you how they leap over hedges and brooks, with exertion just sufficient, and no more. In regard to honour and a sense

could say many other things to his advantage; but I never was malicious, and would rather let both parties plead for themselves: give me the dog, however.

Rochefoucault. Faith! I will give you both, and never boast of my largess in so doing.

La Fontaine. I trust I have removed from you the suspicion of selfishness in my client, and I feel it quite as easy to make a properer disposal of another ill attribute, namely cruelty, which we vainly try to shuffle off our own shoulders upon others, by employing the offensive and most unjust term, brutality. But to convince you of my impartiality, now I have defended the dog from the first obloquy, I will defend the man from the last, hoping to make you think better of each. What you attribute to cruelty, both while we are children and afterward may be assigned for the greater part, to curiosity. Cruelty tends to the extinction of life, the dissolution of matter, the imprisonment and sepulture of truth; and if it were our ruling and chief propensity, the human race would have been extinguished in a few centuries after its appearance. Curiosity, in its primary sense, implies care and consideration.

Rochefoucault. Words often deflect from their primary sense. We find the most curious men the most idle and silly, the least observant and conservative.

La Fontaine. So we think; because we see every hour the idly curious, and not the strenuously; we see only the persons of the one set, and only the works of the other.

More is heard of cruelty than of curiosity, because while curiosity is silent both in itself and about its object, cruelty on most occasions is like the wind, boisterous in itself, and exciting a murmur and bustle in all the things it moves among. Added to which, many of the higher topics whereto our curiosity would turn, are intercepted from it by the policy of our guides and rulers; while the principal ones on which cruelty is most active, are pointed to by the sceptre and the truncheon, and wealth and dignity are the rewards of their attainment. What perversion! He who brings a bullock into a city for its sustenance is called a butcher, and nobody has the civility to take off the hat to him, although knowing him as perfectly as I know Matthieu le Mince, who

served me with those fine kidneys you must have remarked in passing through the kitchen: on the contrary, he who reduces the same city to famine is styled M. le General or M. le Marechal, and gentlemen like you, unprejudiced (as one would think) and upright, make room for him in the antechamber.

Rochefoucault. He obeys orders without the degrading influence of any passion.

La Fontaine. Then he commits a baseness the more, a cruelty the greater. He goes off at another man's setting, as ingloriously as a rat-trap: he produces the worst effects of fury, and feels none: a Cain unirritated by a brother's incense. Rochefoucault. I would hide from you this little rapier, which, like the barber's pole, I have often thought too obtrusive in the streets.

La Fontaine. Never shall I think my countrymen half civilised while on the dress of a courtier is hung the instrument of a cut-throat. How deplorably feeble must be that honour which requires defending at every hour of the day!

Rochefoucault. Ingenious as you are, M. Fontaine, I do not believe that, on this subject, you could add anything to what you have spoken already but really, I do think, one of the most instructive things in the world would be a dissertation on dress by you.

La Fontaine. Nothing can be devised more commodious than the dress in fashion. Perukes have fallen among us by the peculiar dispensation of Providence. As in all the regions of the globe the indigenous have given way to stronger creatures, so have they (partly at least) on the human head. At present the wren and the squirrel are dominant there. Whenever I have a mind for a filbert, I have only to shake my foretop. Improvement does not end in that quarter. I might forget to take my pinch of snuff when it would do me good, unless I saw a store of it on another's

cravat. Furthermore, the slit in the coat behind tells in a moment what it was made for a thing of which, in regard to ourselves, the best preachers have to remind us all our lives: then the central part of our habiliment has either its loop-hole or its portcullis in the opposite direction, still more demonstrative. All these are for very mundane purposes: but Religion and Humanity have whispered some later utilities. We pray the more commodiously, and of course the more frequently, for rolling up a royal ell of stocking round about our knees: and our high-heeled shoes must surely have been worn by some angel, to save those insects which the flat-footed would have crushed to death.

Rochefoucault. Ah! the good dog has awakened: he saw me and my rapier, and ran away. Of what breed is he? for I know nothing of dogs. La Fontaine. And write so well! Rochefoucault. Is he a trufler?

La Fontaine. No, not he; but quite as innocent. Rochefoucault. Something of the shepherd-dog, I suspect.

La Fontaine. Nor that neither; although he fain would make you believe it. Indeed he is very like one: pointed nose, pointed ears, appa rently stiff, but readily yielding; long hair, particularly about the neck; noble tail over his back, three curls deep, exceedingly pleasant to stroke down again; straw-colour all above, white all below. He might take it ill if you looked for it; but so it is, upon my word: an ermeline might envy it.

Rochefoucault. What are his pursuits?

La Fontaine. As to pursuit and occupation, he is good for nothing. In fact, I like those dogs best. . and those men too.

Rochefoucault. Send Nanon then for a pair of silk stockings, and mount my carriage with me : it stops at the Louvre.

Michel-Angelo. Excuse me, Madonna. fault, if mine at all, is mine only in part. Vittoria. I will pardon it the rather, because, whatever it was, it has removed the traces of care and of study from your brow, and supplanted them with an unwonted smile. Pray now what provokes this hilarity?

Michel-Angelo. Not the delay, I assure you, which never has any such effect when I am coming to the Palazzo Pescara, but merely the mention of poetry.

Vittoria. Why so? I perceive there is mischief in your countenance; let me also have a hand in it, if I find it is such as I like.

Michel-Angelo. When I was walking hither, a middle-aged gentleman, tall, round-shouldered,

"But you shall forgive me; you shall soon forgive me," cried he, thrusting into my hand a large volume, from its more opportune station under the coat-flap. I felt it damp, having lain perhaps in the middle of a thousand, two entire winters; and I apprehended cold and rheumatism as much almost at the cover as at the contents. While I held it, uncertain how to reply, he suddenly snatched it back, and cut open the leaves with a very sharp penknife, injuring few of them by the operation, for he was cautious and tender in the extreme.

"I would not delay you in the reading," said he, returning it, "for your praise will richly crown my labours."

Vittoria. What was it? and where is it? Michel-Angelo. Madonna, let me be an example of patience to you. Wait a little, and you shall hear the whole.

Vittoria. No, no, no!

Michel-Angelo. I do not mean the whole of the poem, I mean only the whole of the occurrence. I saw on the title-page that it was a poem in twenty-four cantos, each containing a hundred stanzas, entitled The Strangulation of Cethegus. Between the moments of my surprise and my dismay,..

"You will find," exclaimed the author, "how wrongfully I have been accused by the malevolent and invidious (and there are few others in the world) of copying our most celebrated writers, and of being destitute of originality myself. If occasionally I resemble them in some sort, it is only to show them how they might have written, with a little more care, judgment, and . . we will not say.. genius!"

Vittoria. On such emergencies, a spice of ridicule is our speediest and most palatable remedy for disgust.

Michel-Angelo. When I inquired of him to what gentleman I was indebted for so valuable a present, he stood in amaze at first; then he repeated his family name, then his baptismal, then a poetical intermediate one of his own invention. These, he told me, I must frequently have heard. I now recognised the peculiar object of ebullient jocularity among my juvenile scholars, one of whom said, "He has cracked a biscuit which was baked for a long voyage, and, pouring a profusion of tepid water on it, he has quadrupled its bulk and heaviness!"

Vittoria. Poor man! his vanity must often be wounded.

Michel-Angelo. He has none.
Vittoria. None?

Michel-Angelo. He told me so himself.

"I have been called vain," said he; "but only by those who never knew me. Proud! yes, proud I am! Vanity, in my opinion, (and I am certain that you and all sensible men must think with me,) belongs only to weak minds; pride to

they fell early. The man of genius will seize on the most trifling objects in nature, and raise up a new creation from them. Did you never see an apple or a strawberry which had another more diminutive growing to it? Well, now from this double strawberry or apple I have made out a double Cæsar, such as never was seen before; one the stern resolute senator; the other the gentle sentimental young lover."

On which I submissively asked, whether the stripling who had been received so favorably by the lady, would on the same afternoon be sure of the same facility at his entrance into the senate; and whether it was not requisite to have attained his fortieth year? He smiled at me, and said,

"Surely no, when a poet of the first order gives him a ticket of admission. Does not Horace say we poets have the privilege of daring anything?"

I was afraid to answer, "Yes: but, unhappily, we readers have not the power of bearing any. thing." He continued,

"Cicero is an old gentleman."

Here I ventured to interrupt him, asking if there were in reality more than five or six years between their ages, and by remarking, that although in obscure men and matters, introduced into works of invention, facts might be represented not quite accordant with exact chronology, yet that the two most remarkable characters in the Roman Commonwealth, known by every schoolboy to have entered into public life at the same time, could safely be pushed so far asunder.

No matter, sir!" replied he sharply; "there they are, the poet's own creation. Observe, if you please, I have placed Cethegus between them; a well-grown personage, in his meridian. Behold my pyramid !"

I was silent.

"No originality, I suppose?"

"Very great indeed!" answered I.

"Here is one man," cried he, seizing my hand, one man in the world, willing to the uttermost of his power to do me justice. Strangers give me praise; friends give me only advice; and such advice, Signor Buonarotti, as would impoverish the realms of literature, if taken.”

I stared at him even more wildly than before. "Perhaps you do not recognise me?" said he.

His eyes, which before were only on a level with the cheek-bones and the frontal, now expanded beyond, and assumed the full majesty of the orbicular.

Vittoria. Well, in what manner has he treated his subject?

Michel-Angelo. He could not resist pleasure of telling me:

among friends. We may be easy and familiar in writing or conversing, without letting ourselves down; we may countenance wit; we may even suggest it; I am not rigorous on that head, as some other great writers are. You see I have helped you to a trifle of it; a mere trifle. Now you must confess you caught the spark from me," added he, coaxingly. "I will never claim it in public; I will not indeed! I scarcely consider it in the light of a plagiarism. I have forborne greater things very long, and have only been compelled at last to declare, in a preface, that I wrote the better part of Orlando Furioso many years before it was conceived by Messer Ludovico. I heard his injurious claims, and told nobody the fact." "How does your poem end, sir?" said I, with all the rapidity of impatience.

He mistook my motive, and cried, "Really I am flattered and charmed at the interest you take in it. You have devoured it in your mind already, and would have the very shell. In compliance with your earnestness I will answer the question, although it might be hurtful, I fear, to the effect the whole composition, grasped at once, would produce on you."

I declared the contrary, with many protestations. He raised up his head from its slanting position of distrust and doubt. Again I assured him of my resolution to despatch it at a sitting. Vittoria. I never thought you capable of such duplicity.

Michel-Angelo. Of what may I not be capable, if you absolve me with so gracious a smile?

"I will then tell you how it ends," continued he, "if you never have read the history. Cethegus was, I am sorry to say, a person of bad character, although of birth. With perfect fidelity I have translated the speeches of Sallust; but Sallust had no notion (and history could do nothing for him) of placing the culprit bound between two Turkish mutes, with a friar in the rear, while the great bell tolled from Santa Maria Maggiore." I started.

moral, social, political, and," I was about to add inwardly, poetical, when he seized my hand, and said, with firm deliberation,

"There are two men in degenerate Rome who abhor the vicious in conduct and embrace the pure in poetry. When you have bestowed as much time as I have on the contemplation and composition of it, your surprise (but not your admiration, I humbly trust) will be considerably diminished, on the repeated perusal of my few edited volumes. I am as sure of eternal fame as if I had it in my pocket. Fame, Signor MichelAngelo, has a snail's growth; true, real, genuine fame has, and you may know it by that. But, I promise you, in another century or two you shall see mine a very giant. I have sometimes thought I have a host of enemies: I now begin to think I can have only one: I have him in my eye. He is capable of putting on all manner of faces. I myself have seen him looking like an elderly man; some of my friends have seen him looking quite young; and others have seen him what they thought was middle-aged. He manages his voice equally well. If you go into twenty streets, only mention me, and you will find him at the same moment in all of them. Happily, he always hits in the wrong place. He says I am restless for celebrity! he says I want vigour and originality!"

He ended with three little titters; and these at least were in good metre, and showed care in the composition.

Vittoria. Happy man! for vanity is rarely attended by vexation of spirit, and nobody is oppressed by a sense of emptiness. I must now undertake his defence.

Michel-Angelo. Properly then have you exclaimed happy man!

Vittoria. The clock and bell indeed are stumbling-blocks; but there are some instances in which even so inopportune an introduction of them is less censurable than in others. Suppose for example a dramatic poet in an age when the greater part of his audience was rude and igno

"Bell!" I soliloquized, rather too audibly. "If you never have felt the effect of a bell at executions, and particularly on the stage; if you never have felt the effect of a bell, Signor Buonarotti, through your brain and heart," said he, breathing hard, and allowing his watery diagonal eyes only half their width, "then do I most sincerely pity you, Signor Buonarotti, and wish you a very good morning."

I bowed, and fancied my deliverance was accomplished. But he instantly turned round again, and added,

"If you object to a bell, you may object to a clock. Now, it was precisely as the clock struck midnight that justice was done by me upon the execrable Cethegus, as a warning to all future generations."

16 Nobody can be more firmly convinced," said I, "how execrable is this violation of all laws,

But if

and intellectual with the requisites of his art, I would not quarrel with him for indulging the market-folk with a hearty peal of bells, or perhaps a discharge of artillery, while they are following the triumphal car of Cæsar, or shouting round the conflagration of Persepolis! another, in offering his tragedy for the perusal of our times, should neglect to sweep away the remnants of an old largess given to the multitude, it can only be from the conviction that they are his proper company; that he is about to be tried by his own order; that his services are mostly due to the majority; and that the world's population in simpletons is by no means on the wane.

Consider now, my dear Michel-Angelo, if inconsistencies, absurdities, anachronisms, are to be found only in one department of the arts. I appeal to you, the president, prince, dictator of them all, whether it is as ridiculous to represent an angel playing on a violin, for which