[387]. Zénobie boasted herself to be impeccably “regular.” The Prince observed that he was much obliged to the Abbé for paying such attention to Aristotle, but that he could not excuse Aristotle for making the Abbé write such a tragedy. This famous mot, like others, is of disputed attribution. It is sometimes given to the Prince de Rohan-Guémené.
[388]. A work of youth which appeared as early as 1627. Hédelin was never elected to the Academy; and in 1664 endeavoured to start a new one of his own from a coterie which he, in imitation of Conrart, had formed. But “Trajan was” not “content,” wisely enough: and France was spared a skim-milk Forty.
[389]. It forms the first volume of the Amsterdam edition, in 3 vols. (1715), of Hédelin’s critical work. The second and third, which are together about the size of the first, include the extensive and dismal lucubrations on Terence, &c.
[390]. Who translated (with a preface not virulently Rymerical, v. infra, p. 392) Rapin’s Reflections upon Poetry almost as soon as it appeared. Rapin was a copious theologian, an elegant and fertile Latin versifier. Of his critical works in French, the Comparaisons noted above were produced annually between 1668 and 1671, except the “Thucydides and Livy,” which appeared ten years later. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence date from 1672: those, more famous, on Poetics and Poets, from 1674. His critical Works were early collected, and the complete collection appeared in English, by various hands, including Rymer’s, in 2 vols. (London, 1706). The Amsterdam ed. of the original (3 vols., 1709-10) contains, in addition, a small treatise, Du Grand et du Sublime, which must not be neglected, and some others, together with the Comparaison de Pindare et d’Horace of the architect Blondel.
[391]. Chap. vii. In the preceding chapter there is one of those sentences which ruin this kind of criticism, by and of themselves. “Games are of the number of those actions which may occur in the lives of heroes.” Most certainly: but one feels that Rapin said it simply because there are games in Homer and Virgil, and that, if there had not been, he would probably have said, “Games are not,” &c.
[392]. “Cette Princesse oublie sa pudeur pour écouter sa compassion....” In the rest of the clause the English translator softens the crudity of the French curiosité. But it is still more pleasant to oppose to the nasty niceness of the French Jesuit the words of the author of The Christian Year: “Nausicaa—cujus persona nihil usquam aut venustius habet aut pudentius veterum Poesis” (Præl. xii. vol. i. p. 195, Oxford, 1844).
[393]. Mais la pudeur ni toutes les bienséances extérieures n’y sont point blessées.
[394]. So the English: Fr. “femme de bien.” I like to read Rapin in both versions, contemporary as they are, and antiphonal of the sentiment of the time, in its two chief languages.
[395]. These latter are mostly from the Réflexions sur la Poétique (Œuvres, ii. 175 sq.) It is quite at the beginning of these that the unlucky charge against Dante of “wanting fire” (see i. 175 note) occurs; it is followed later, and perhaps to some extent explained, if not excused, by the further criticism that he has “l’air trop profond,” “une ordonnance triste et morne.”
[396]. Tristram Shandy, iii. 12. He was not always unknown among us. Dryden, whether out of modesty, fashion, or humour, takes leave to call him “the best of modern critics,” and he was translated in 1695. The mistakes referred to above are all the worse because there was actually a French writer named Bossut, a mathematician of distinction in the eighteenth century.