[397]. Not, as it is constantly quoted, peut avoir de l’esprit. It will be observed that the difference is considerable.
[398]. My copy is the 2nd ed. of next year in 12mo.
[399]. The standard edition is that of La Monnoye (7 vols. 4to, Paris, 1722, with an 8th containing Ménage’s Anti-Baillet &c.)
[400]. Jan. 1665—first weekly, then monthly. It became a government publication in 1701. Gui Patin, in the March after its appearance, is very angry (Let. DCLXV. iii. 517, ed. cit. sup.) with it, and says with voice prophetic of many injured ones to come, “nous verrons si ces prétendus censeurs, sine suffragio populi et Quiritium, auront le crédit et l’autorité de critiquer ainsi tous ceux qui n'écriront pas à leur goût.”
[401]. 1672-1820. Donneau de Visé was its first editor, and Thomas Corneille its most distinguished writer.
[402]. It can scarcely be necessary to give bricks of so large and rambling a house. “Mr Borrichius témoigne aussi que le style [of Ovid’s Heroides] est fort pur” is, and has to be, the kind of thing. Perhaps such a glut of authorities may have insensibly nauseated men of authority, and so Baillet may have worked both ways. He is good enough to admit (v. 461) that “one cannot say this nation [the English] is inferior even for Poetry to several others of the North,” and he has heard of “Abraham Cowley, John Downe ou Jean Donne, Cleveland, Edmond, [sic] Waller, Jean Denham, George Herbert, le Chancelier Bacon, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Beaumont, Ben, Johnson, Suckling, Jean Milton,” &c. It is open to Shaconians to contend that as the comma at “Edmond” is undoubtedly superfluous, so is that at “Bacon,” and that Baillet—the learned Baillet—meant to rank “le Chancelier Bacon-Shakespeare” among poets.
[403]. Jugements des Savants sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la Rhétorique (3 vols., Paris, 1703-16). M. Bourgoin, I think, refers to Gibert, but the book was first brought seriously to my notice by a very kind private communication from Professor Scott of the University of Michigan. Luckily it is in the British Museum; but it does not seem easy to obtain a copy for oneself. Gibert taught for some half-century in the Collége Mazarin, and was repeatedly rector of the University of Paris. He wrote other books,—a formal “Rhetoric” juxta Aristotelis doctrinam, strictures on Rollin, &c. Gibert is, it seems, appended to some edd. of Baillet.
[404]. See, for instance, his reference to Patrizzi, who is evidently to him rather magni nominis umbra than anything tangible.
[405]. His Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688-98) is most disappointing, even to fervent opponents of “the sect of the Nicolaitans” and fervent lovers of the Contes de ma Mère l’Oye. That he knew little and that his case was bad does not matter; but I at least cannot find the esprit which apologists plead.
[406]. J. Warton (Adventurer, No. 49) asserts, on the authority of Ménage, that even Rapin was “totally ignorant” of Greek. M. does not quite say this: but he does say that R. got his Greek quotations from Tanneguy-Lefèvre, Madame Dacier’s father (Ménagiana, i. 175 of the collected ed.)