(120 Conieille ; his Life and Wiilings. [|Dkc. 



her second husband a M. de Farcy, by -whom she l^ecanie the great 

 grandmother of the celebrated enthusiast Charlotte Corday, who perished 

 on the scaffold during the revolution, for having ridded France of the 

 detestable IMarat, the greatest monster that has disgraced the modern 

 world. Plis eldest son, who was a captain in a cavalry regiment, 

 and one of the gentlemen of the King's chamber, offended him by mar- 

 rying the daughter of a tradesman ; and as if his pride and prejudices 

 began only to grow when his genius f^iiled, he took the title of Sieur de 

 Damville, instead of the more noble name by which he had been distin- 

 guished up to that time, and by which alone he lives to all posterity. 

 'I'he latterpart of his life presented the most humiliating of all spectacles ; 

 he passed several years in "second childishness, and mere oblivion." 

 As if with a presentiment of his fate, a short time before this calamity 

 befel him, he arranged his affairs, with a care he had never before dis- 

 played, and burnt all his papers. A long sickness had so entirely 

 exhausted his very limited means, that at the moment when his dissolution 

 was visibly at hand, he was reduced to the most urgent want. Boileau, 

 who displayed an umiecessary, and oflen an unjust hostility against him, 

 no sooner heard of his distress, than he hastened to the king, and offered 

 to give up his o^vn pension rather than that so worthy a person as Cor- 

 neille should have his last moments embittered by the want of common 

 necessaries. The king immediately sent '200 louis to the suffering poet, 

 by La Chapelle, Boileau's kinsman. Two days afterwards he died, in 

 the night between the 3()th of September and the 1st of October 1684, 

 in the house where he had for some time dwelt, in the rue d'Argenteuil, 

 and was buried in the church of St. Roch, where nothing served to point 

 out the spot honoured by his remains until the. Duke of Orleans, in 

 1821, had a bust of him, and a slab containing an inscription to his 

 memory, placed in the wall of tlie church. But to the poet who first 

 taught his countrymen the art of the drama, who pointed out to succeed^ 

 ing times the true sources of the sublime and passionate emotions which 

 that art has the power of exciting, and who disclosed the siveetness and 

 boldness which their verse possesses, no other monument was necessary 

 than that imperishable fame which has identified his name with the 

 brightest and proudest period of the literature of his nation. 



THF. DARK FIGURE : A CANDLE-LIGHT STORY. 



A TALE of the days of other years ! I was twenty-two ; sick, idle 

 and unhappy. I had lost my mistress, and quarrelled with my friend. 

 Wine, which I applied to for relief, made me nervous ; brandy gave me 

 the head-ache ; books were still worse. ]\Iy hat began to slouch ; my 

 cravat made a point of untying itself; my whole outward man exhibited 

 symptoms of the pitch-fork style of dressing. I shunned society ; che- 

 rished my knees at the fire ; — and cultivated a wrinkle of some promise 

 which I discovered winding, like the Serpentine River, in a straight line, 

 across my brow. Too delicate in constitution to drink, I had thoughts 

 of taking to opium ; but the drug made me sick. Uncle William at this 

 epoch, willing that I should try the country air, put himself to death ; 

 and I succeeded to a small estate in Cumberland. It was said that his 

 losing a considerable bet was the proximate cause of what many persons 

 called a " rash step." For my part I did not know ; but I inquired 



