FRENCH POEM BY MALHERBE

The two stanzas your correspondent E.R.C.B. has cited (Vol. ii., p. 71.) are from an elegiac poem by MALHERBE (who died in 1628, at the good old age of seventy-three), which is entitled *Consolation à Monsieur Du Perrier sur la Mort de sa Fille*. It has always been a great favorite of mine; for, like Gray's Elegy and the celebrated *Coplas* of Jorge Manrique on the death of his father, beside its philosophic moralising strain, it has that pathetic character which makes its way at once to the heart. I will transcribe the first four stanzas for the sake of the beauty of the fourth:— "Ta douleur,…