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But he was no idyllist, though he could be tender as Mme.

Florian imitated Salomon Gessner, the Swiss idyllist, and his style has all the artificial delicacy and sentimentality of the Gessnerian school.

He was already a poet by predilection, an idyllist and steeped in the classical archaism of the time, when, in 1784, his taste for the antique was confirmed by a visit to Rome made in the company of two schoolfellows, the brothers Trudaine.

From an idyllist and elegist we find him suddenly transformed into an unsparing master of poetical satire.

From the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the idyllist may soar on poesy’s viewless wings, may traverse with fawn-skin and spear the moonlit heights of Cithæron though Faun and Bassarid dance there no more.