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It is in the two posthumous and fragmentary works, the 'Comic History, or Travels in the Moon,' and the 'Comic History of the States and Empires of the Sun,' that we must study Cyrano seriously. During his illness he had commissioned Lebret to give the Travels to the public, along with,' as the book ends, the History of the Sun, the Spark, and several other works of the kind, if those who have robbed me of them will restore them to him, as I implore with all my heart.' It seems likely that his friends had secreted the papers for better security. Lebret published the Travels; and another friend, anonymous, but possibly Jacques Rohault, first a Gassendist and then a Cartesian, published the Sun,' with a Fragment of Physics, the schematic analysis of which is followed closely by this Rohault in the treatise on the same subject he gave to the world some thirty years later. The 'Spark,' in which Lebret says that Cyrano 'proved the feeling of stones, the instinct of plants, and the reason of animals,' has entirely disappeared.

It is of little importance whether the lacunæ in the Travels were omissions made by the timid Lebret, or were due to an unfinished manuscript. The editor of the Sun' was more bold; and Lebret himself let pass more heresies than he knew. What, then, was Cyrano's purpose in these medleys of physical theories and fantastic satires? The question of the plurality of inhabited worlds had exercised Galileo, and Campanella, and Gassendi; he may have read the French translation of Francis Goodwin's recent 'Man in the Moon,' or the Moon newly discovered and visited by a Spanish adventurer; or simply, after his own report, he had chanced to maintain one night in conversation, that the moon was a world to which our own was but a moon. The boldness of the conceit, strengthened by contradiction, as he says, pleased his humour, and served him for his starting-point. Lebret, praising the merry humour of his 'illustrious friend, who had none but extraordinary sentiments,' is sure that Cyrano's single aim was to amuse himself and others by the free play of an irresponsible imagination. At the same time, he begs to draw up a list of ancient philosophers, who had allowed the possibility of an inhabited moon, whereby it might be seen his friend's chimerical fancy was not so absolutely devoid of likelihood. For himself, he is content to know that 'the heavens declare the glory of God.' The editor of the 'Sun' is also sure that the reader has only to deal with 'agreeable reveries.' His friend knew that there was no opinion so ridiculous

as not to be authorised by some philosopher or other in sour earnest, whereas his friend could smile. Remembering the study of Lucretius, so constantly pursued among the disciples of Gassendi, he advances another tentative reason; perhaps, as Lucretius expounded the doctrine of Epicurus in verse for the benefit of his countrymen, so Cyrano believed the present public might be induced to consider high questions, if set forth to them in the guise of romances.

Take away the disquisitions upon physics, and you have a precursor of Gulliver, one of those trial pieces which always precede the masterpiece and classic of its genre. Cyrano, girdled with flasks of dew, exposes himself to the rays of the sun. He is drawn straight aloft, breaks some of the flasks, and finds himself in Canada. The world has plainly turned upon its axis, despite Ptolemy and though your French Governor fears to believe it. He then essays a flying-machine, and achieves bruises. Anointed with marrow-fat, he hastens at nightfall to save his machine, which the soldiers have taken for a war-engine. They are conducting experiments with rockets attached to it; he leaps inside. When the force of the explosions has subsided, the moon acts upon the marrow. Landing, he finds the inhabitants of the moon are giants, who go on all fours. He is seized upon, and used as a raree-show. What is he? He must be taken to the capital, to make a pair with the Queen's ape—a Spaniard, as it turns out, who had fled to the only country where even so much as imagination is free.' The servants of the capital dispute among themselves as to his species, and decide at length that he is a sort of featherless parrot. It is in vain that he defends his human dignity upon the principles of the scholastic Aristotle; an edict is issued forbidding belief that this strange animal possesses reason, or anything more than instinct. Cyrano has further dared to state that the moon from which he has come is a world. The case is a hanging matter, and is transferred before the king, who mildly allows a public recantation and apology for such scandalous opinions. Cyrano returns to earth and Rome, with the help of a Solarian, the Dæmon of Socrates, who can occasionally endure to sojourn on earth, and has been the familiar spirit of Cato, among others, and Faust, and Gassendi.

The narrative realism, the charming plausibility of Swift, are not to be expected, nor yet Swift's biting misanthropy; but, at least, there is no lack of pleasant fancy and ingenious irony. The Lunarians, for example, have two methods of speech: the higher

classes use songs without words, whereby even argumentation delights the ear as if one were at a concert; while the populace employ speech of limbs, vastly pretty to watch. Abstemious, the inhabitants of the moon nourish themselves upon

odours ; the very vegetarians among them take care that their food shall have died a natural death. The currency consists in couplets and quatrains, only these must first pass the mint as of true stamp and metal. The doctors judge your case by your physiognomy; euthanasia and cremation are practised. Such infants as do not promise greatness of nose, and consequently of talent, are treated after the fashion of Spartan weaklings. You have floating towns, , if no floating island of Laputa. A Lunarian philosopher discourses upon Relativity much in the manner of Raphael ben Ezra in · Hypatia ;' the dying appeal and defence made by a cabbage to its less happy and less noble executioner is worthy of rank among the various apologues which philosophers have felt constrained to write against anthropomorphism. The slender reach of human senses, which is the subject of Voltaire's 'Micromegas,' is touched upon ; the explanation given why the aged Lunarians pay respect and deference to the young, and parents obey their children, might have supplied philosophical arguments to Mr. Anstey for his · Vice Versâ.'

The fragment of The States and Empires of the Sun' is linked to the preceding work by an admirable piece of goodhumoured and realistic narrative. Cyrano, returning from Rome to Toulouse, finds himself much too famous for his safety. His portrait and the account of his travels are known and exhibited. What he has written plainly smells of the faggot. He takes refuge with a friend in a neighbouring château, since he is doubly enraged to die for a matter he barely credits himself.' A deputation of long robes promise this friend that, out of love for him, they will engage their honour to burn his guest 'without scandal.' Cyrano is captured by accident, and put into prison ; escapes, and, after hair-breadth adventures, is captured again. On the roof of his prison be constructs a new machine, being this time more jealous of M. Jules Verne's scientific plausibility. Coming to a body neighbouring the sun, he finds a little man superintending the birth of a brother from a hillock. Sir Thomas Browne of the 'Religio Medici' would have delighted to have been present. The little man speaks in an unknown but readily intelligible tongue; for, he explains, as there is but one Truth in all sciences, so the instinctive voice of Nature should be intelligible to all children. Cyrano is thus in possession of the language of flowers and birds. He proceeds to the sun-finding himself growing transparent by the way, and proof against the law of gravityand meets with a company of spirits whose power of imagination is so great that, with them, thought becomes act on the spot. These behave themselves as they might in one of Hoffmann's fantastic tales. But, unfortunately, he chances upon the Land of Birds, who, as Aristophanes previously reported, scorn men even more than they hate them. That these human creatures should dare to usurp authority over their betters, and suppose they can attain truth with the help of their senses, which in quality are manifestly inferior to those of their victims ! Cyrano, to save himself, gives it out that he is an ape. This does not serve, for he is speedily convicted of not being imitative to the true apish degree. He is preserved by a charitable parrot, whom he had restored to liberty while on earth. The whole episode comes near to be a masterpiece. Voltaire would have little to remove or add in the counter-pleas offered in the Parliament of Birds against an animal accused of being a man. Thence he passes into a woodland region, and is able to report the conversations held by the trees. Campanella joins him, and proceeds to show him that death is but the road to a higher perfection; and that the souls of philosophers, being ‘more delicate than the instruments which serve to torture them,' form the chief inhabitants of the sun. They are interrupted by a couple from the Realm of Lovers. This, as Cyrano hears from the lady, is a land liable to inundations, since its inhabitants are given to shed oceans of tears. Under one of these disasters, one of my lovers, whom they called the Jealous, urged me to pluck out my heart, and then to embark in it; for it would hold me, as it had held so many already; and would not sink, because it was too light. He assured me that all I need fear was a conflagration, especially as the substance of such a vessel was very subject to fire. All that I had to do was to set sail upon the sea of his tears, with the blindfold of his love for a sail; the favouring breeze of his sighs, in spite of the storm of his rivals, would waft me safely to haven.' She had been on the point of taking him at his word, when this jealous lover was seized and condemned to end his days in the Republic of Truth for abuse of metaphors. Cyrano, the writer now of good honest prose, manages at once to satirise the galant' style of his contemporaries and his old self. And after a joint visit to the Rivers of Memory, Imagination, and Judgment, and

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the Five Fountains of the Senses which feed the Lake of Sleepwhich would have furnished a number of Addison's 'Spectator'Campanella is on the point of introducing him to Descartes, when the fragment ends abruptly.

The contemporaries of Cyrano had no call for the severe brow in their judgment of his philosophical opinions. It was not long since the condemnation of Galileo; but in Paris, Gassendi taught in security, and Campanella—whom Cyrano may well have met in his master's house—had found a refuge after his twenty-seven years of an Italian prison. Descartes must complain that his works were put upon the Index; but presently they became the • Shakespeare and musical glasses of the blue-stockings of the period. Cyrano, indeed, does not seem to have suffered any official persecution. It would have been quite another matter if he had expressed an ethical doctrine. That true, if imperfect, poet Théophile de Viau, suffered his prison but a few years before, because he proclaimed free morals all too energetically.

But Cyrano had no ethical doctrine to urge. Young and turbulent, he may well have sown his wild oats, and have been all too free of a jesting tongue. There is nothing to show that he associated with the noisy 'esprits forts' of the period. At all events, the fantastic wit and formidable swordsman of tongue and pen reveals himself, in his later years, as the devotee of physics who tempered his severe studies with smiling doubts and merry fancies. He died immature. With age, you would possibly, or in all likelihood, have had him passing from a sensual to an idealistic philosophy, from Gassendi to Descartes, though he could never have forgiven Descartes for regarding animals as mere automata. His personal worth is perhaps better attested by the friendship of the honourable Lebret than by the long list of admirers upon which Lebret relies. It is certain that he desired to be remembered by posterity; it is certain also that he would have accomplished his desire if he had but placed on record his own true life, his adventures in action and thought, after the lively manner of the pages which preface his fragment of the ‘Sun.' As it is, two words of incomplete criticism have done more for him than his two volumes of creative miscellanies. Dictator Boileau, in a lenient moment, laid down that he preferred the 'audacious burlesque' of Cyrano to the frigid verses of an unknown Mottin. It is by this, and by this alone, until M. Rostand used the name for his poetical play, that Cyrano's countrymen remembered him, if they remembered him at all.

GARNET SMITH,

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