BAUDELAIRE, Charles, who would have been pleased to be considered as a master in the French Satanic school of poetry, was born at Paris in April 1821. He was the son of a man of some distinction, who had been the friend of Condorcet and of Cabanis. The poet’s life contained no episode more important than a voyage to the East Indies, where he resided for some time, and whence he brought perhaps the Oriental languor and the curious delight in perfumes which make themselves felt in many of his verses. Baudelaire returned to Paris while still a very young man, and sought the literary, or at least what is called the Bohemian society of the capital. He admired Μ. Théophile Gautier, as Μ. Gautier had admired Victor Hugo, and his poems are all conceived in the school of Romanticism. Romanticism, or, to define it rather widely, the school of revolt against French academic taste, the search for remote experiences, the artistic reproduction of the excesses and vagaries of passion, found in Baudelaire its most reckless disciple. Some portions of his verses, Les Fleurs du Mai, appeared originally in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and when they were published in a volume, had the misfortune to attract the notice of the police. When so many low unwholesome works were published without scandal, it was an error to attract notice to the verses of Baudelaire. The chief notes of his poetry are a perverse delight in loathsome subjects, a curious reaction towards Christianity and repentance, a pleasure in the last refinements of art, above all an unsleeping self-consciousness and affectation. Less unpleasant than his Fleurs du Med, are his exquisite and gem-like Petits Poèmes en Prose, and his volumes of subtle and ingenious criticism. Baudelaire died in 1867 at the age of forty-six, after ...