RACAN.

“The Marquis de Racan,” says Menage, “being in garrison at Calais, he made these four verses at nineteen years of age:

Estime qui voudra la mort épouvantable,
Et la face l’horreur de tous les animaux;
Quant à moy je la tiens pour le poinct desirable
Où commencent nos biens, et finissent nos maux.

Some time after, being at Paris, and repeating those verses as his own to his friend Ivrante, his friend told him that he should not impose upon him, that he knew very well those verses were the first quatrain of Mathieu’s book, intitled &lsq;Les Tablettes de la vie et de la mort.’ M. de Racan who had never seen that book, denied obstinately and for a considerable time, that Mathieu had made those verses, until Ivrante

brought Mathieu’s book and showed him the verses, at which M. de Racan was not a little amazed. I do not question the truth of this story, being fully persuaded that M. de Racan, who told it me often in the presence of several people, is a very sincere man. But I doubt very much of what Leonardo Salviati says in the first book of his Avertimenti della Lingua Italians, that a poet of his time who had never seen cardinal Bembo’s sonnets, had made some exactly like them.” You see that M. Menage makes a great difference between Racan’s adventure and those of the other poets whom he names. He finds something in the first that is more extraordinary; I should judge otherwise of it, if I were to say what I think of it. Few people are ignorant that well-bred children are taught some moral and pious maxims, and that care is taken even before they can read, to get by heart some sententious staves of verses. The Protestants pitch upon some passages of David’s psalms, or as the Catholics do, upon some quatrains of Pibrac, or of another poet of the same nature, which are never wanting in any country. Without doubt, little Racan when he was but five or six years of age, heard his governess or his mother repeat some of those fine quatrains, or some of Mathieu’s, which are generally bound up with Pibrac. The traces that were imprinted on his brain sunk in, and remained so several years; afterwards they appeared again and seemed to him an object entirely new, without rousing up the remembrance of the author, or of the book which had occasioned them; he therefore thought himself to be the author of those four verses, though at the bottom they were only an imperfect reminiscence. If a man would carefully examine himself, he would find upon a thousand occasions, that what he takes to be his own invention, is a thing that he has heard or read without remembering the circumstance.—Art. Racan.