Que ce borgne* a bien plus Fortune pour amie
Qu'un de ces curieux qui, soufflant l'alchimie,

De sage devient fol, et de riche indigent !
Cestuy-la sent enfin sa vigueur consumée,
Et voit tout son argent se resoudre en fumée ;
Mais lui, de la fumée il tire de l'argent."

As will appear directly, I have no need to try my hand at the first. I give the following version of the second in default of a better :—

"Of careless souls this is the meeting-place,

Which sometimes I frequent for my delight,
The master calls himself La Plante with right,
For to a plant his fortune he can trace.
You see there Bilot pale as in sad case,

From both whose nostrils vapour takes its flight,
While Sallard tickles at the servant light,
Who laughs with nose up and foreshortened face.
How much this one-eyed better friends must be
With Fortune than those alchemists we see

From wise becoming mad, from rich quite poor!
They find at length their health and strength decay,
Their money all in smoke consumed away;

But he from smoke gets money more and more."

Of a truth, it may be remarked, parenthetically, save in the fact that he was singular with respect to eyes, this La Plante was the very fore-ordained prototype of Cope, with his opulent Tobacco Plant of the twofold leaves, literary and nicotian!

Now, in the Tobacco Plant for August 1874, under the heading, "Who wrote it?" Mr. Besant's translation of the first of these sonnets is cited from the "French Humourists" (p. 184), together with a sonnet *La Plante was "" un cabaretier borgne qui tenait un cabaret borgne," the one-eyed host of a low wine-shop, or, as we should say, pot-house.

on Tobacco by Sir Robert Aytoun, so closely resembling it that it was clear that either Sir Robert imitated Saint-Amant or Saint-Amant imitated Sir Robert; whence the question, Whose was the original? Sir Robert was born 1570, and died February 163, as is recorded on his monument in Westminster Abbey. He studied civil law at the University of Paris, and was on the Continent from 1590 till 1603, when a Latin poem to King James brought him into favour with that monarch. He was an accomplished courtier, was private secretary to Queen Anne, and afterwards to Henrietta Maria, and received many a good gift from royalty. His English and Latin poems (he wrote others in Greek and French, but these have not been preserved) were privately printed in 1871, by the Rev. Charles Rogers, LL.D., Historiographer to the Historical Society, from the collation of two MSS., and the comparison with such of the pieces as appear in Watson's Collection. The sonnet on Tobacco is not in that collection. Aytoun's verses are smooth and graceful, and sometimes something more. Dryden said they were among the best of that age; Burns altered, without improving, his "Forsaken Mistress" ("I do confess thou art sae fair"); the first "Old-Long-Syne" is attributed to him; and the "Invocation of his Mistress," which Dr. Rogers prints in his volume, has been ascribed to Raleigh. It is that containing the well-known stanza :

"Silence in love bewrays more woe

Than words, though ne'er so witty;
A beggar that is dumb, you know,
Doth merit double pity."

He was, therefore, quite capable of writing the sonnet

in question; and, as Saint-Amant visited England in 1631, Sir Robert might then have shown him it in MS. But, on the other hand, Saint-Amant published his first volume of poems in 1627 or 1629 (I find both dates given, and have no means of deciding); and these two sonnets seem to have been included in it, both referring to his Belle-Isle period. Then there is the direct and specific evidence of the letter cited by M. Livet, which I have given in the first part. Again, we have the two sonnets together in SaintAmant, while there is no other such piece in Sir Robert. Furthermore, we know that Saint-Amant was a great smoker, while it is not at all probable that Sir Robert, as a favourite of James, indulged in the weed. Lastly, I don't believe that Sir Robert ever sat on a faggot in his life, being far too courtly a gentleman; whereas Saint-Amant may have done so countless times in one and the other cabaret borgne. Wherefore, although, as a leal Scot, I would fain claim the honour for my countryman of writing this, 'one of the earliest sonnets extant in praise of tobacco," as Mr. Besant says, I am constrained to yield to Saint-Amant the credit of being the original.

66

And now to finish with our jolly friend. Mr. Besant says: "Though he is a dependant, he is never a parasite. A gentleman he is born, a gentleman he remains." This is quite true. Strange as it may seem, he was thoroughly independent in everything, and could be haughty if his self-respect were touched. As a poet, he says: "If I read the works of another, it is simply to guard myself from repeating his thoughts." One day, says Tallemant, dining at the table of the coadjutor (the celebrated De Retz,

afterwards cardinal), he could exclaim before an assemblage of valets: "I have fifty years of liberty on my head." "You have written pretty verses,' said Esprit, his colleague at the Academy, to him, at the table of Chapelain. "Deuce take your pretty," he cried angrily, and could scarcely be persuaded to stay. On another occasion he shouted: "Shut the doors! let no one enter; no valets here! I have trouble enough to recite before their masters." He called himself the fat Virgil, and the Norman Democritus. I must not omit to mention one of the best jokes of his life it is said that in his latter days he had hopes of an abbey, or even a bishopric. Surely he would have been a noble priest, after the order of Saint Rabelais; for of him, as of Chaucer's Monk, it could have safely been said :—

"Now certeinly he was a fair prelat;
He was not pale as a for-pynèd goost."

And as of Chaucer's Frere :

"Ful sweetly herde he confessioun,
And plesaunt was his absolucioun.
He was an esy man to geve penance.

He knew wel the tavernes in every toun,
And every ostiller or gay tapstere."

BEN JONSON

I

IT is now threescore years since Gifford brought out and dedicated to Canning his edition of the works of Ben Jonson, with the text carefully revised and annotated, and elaborate introductory Memoirs. These Memoirs made a new era in the posthumous history of Rare Ben, tearing to shreds and tatters all the slanders against him, whether woven of errors or of malignant inventions, which had been handed down from one careless writer to another, and particularly all the foul calumnies of his envying and traducing Shakespeare, which the commentators on the latterMalone, Steevens, and the rest-had fabricated out of the flimsiest and most incongruous yarns of suspicion and prejudice. It was a work well suited to Gifford's mind and temper-keen, vigilant, honest, and somewhat acrid; and he is quite at his best in it, inspired with a generous passion to redeem a great and venerable name from unmerited obloquy. I don't know whether his version of Juvenal still survives; I fancy very few of this generation have read his "Baviad" and “Mæviad,” which young Byron termed the first satires of the day, calling aloud, "Why slumbers Gifford?" and, "Arouse thee, Gifford !" but if his