[507]. “In his Juvenilia ... his rhyme is always constrained or forced.”—Discourse on Satire.
[508]. Chapelain might like the early romances (v. supra, p. 260). But here Boileau was the spokesman of France.
[509]. They have deceived the very elect, e.g., M. Rigault, who in not altogether unnatural amazement at the dictum, “Spenser wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu,” classes (Q. des A. et des M., p. 311) Dryden as an ancien enragé. But M. Rigault is at a wrong angle in most of the English part of his book,—so much so as to strike a chill into any one who has to criticise a foreign literature, lest, lacking the grace of the Muses, he too go astray.
[510]. A phrase of Blake’s.
[511]. The fact is that the two are parts of the same book; and that a second edition of the first appeared in 1692, just before the first of the second next year.
[512]. Vol. ii. pp. 107-130 of the 1706 edition of Rapin in English. At p. 113 Rymer says that he will not here examine the various qualities which make English fit above all other languages for Heroic Poesy, “the world expecting these matters learnedly and largely discussed in a particular treatise on that subject.” This apparently important announcement is marginally annotated “Sheringham.” I suppose this was Robert S., a Norfolk man (as his name imports), of Caius College, and Proctor at Cambridge just before the Commonwealth ejection. He is described (see Dict. Nat. Biog.) as an “excellent linguist,” but seems to have been more of an antiquary than of a man of letters. As the D. N. B. says nothing of any such work as Rymer glances at, I suppose the world was disappointed of it by his sudden death in May 1678, four years after Rymer wrote.
[513]. I do not think that Rymer ever intended to be rude to Dryden, though his clumsy allusions to “Bays” in the Short View naturally rubbed the discrowned Laureate the wrong way for a time.
[514]. Rymer’s elaborate directions for removing the Romantic offence of this play, and adjusting it to Classical correctness and decorum, are among the most involuntarily funny things in criticism (pp. 19-24).
[515]. Rymer knew something of Old French. How horrified he would have been if he had come across the lines in Floriant et Florete (2904, 2905)—
“Si samble qu' enfes voit disant