'
'I feel strongly,' I said, 'the difference in French styles in prose, but
little in poetry.'
'The fact is,' said Tocqueville, 'that the only French poetry, except
that of Racine, that is worth reading is the light poetry. I do not think
that I could now read Lamartine, though thirty years ago he delighted
me.'
'The French taste,' I said, 'in English poetry differs from ours. You
read Ossian and the "Night Thoughts."'
'As for Ossian,' he answered, 'he does not seem to have been ever popular
in England. But the frequent reference to the "Night Thoughts," in the
books and letters of the last century, shows that the poem was then in
everybody's memory. Foreigners are in fact provincials. They take up
fashions of literature as country people do fashions of dress, when the
capital has left them off. When I was young you probably had ceased to be
familiar with Richardson. We knew him by heart. We used to weep over the
Lady Clementina, whom I dare say Miss Senior never heard of.
'During the first Empire, we of the old _regime_ abandoned Paris, as we
do now, and for the same reasons. We used to live in our chateaux, where
I remember as a boy hearing Sir Charles Grandison and Fielding read
aloud.
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