7 DECEMBER 1918, Page 3

France has lost a brilliant poet-dramatist in M. Edmond Rostand,

who died on Monday. He was only fifty, but he had been famous the world over, for more than twenty years past, as the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, that tragi-comedy in which wit and pathos and the heroic sentiment of France are happily blended. M. Rostand's genius, as expressed in his few plays, and especially in Chantecler, was peculiarly French, and his countrymen recognized the fact by according him such national homage as we have paid to Mr. Kipling, or in earlier days to Tennyson.