[45] It is said that the great dramatic poet Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) is alluded to as one of those poets.
[46] All the “Keys” pretend this is a hit at the “Dictionary of the Academy,” and they may be right; for the Dictionary, only published in 1694, six years after the “Characters” first saw the light, had been expected for more than forty years. But most likely La Bruyère was thinking of the tragedy-ballet of Psyché (1671), words by Pierre Corneille and Molière, music by Quinault and Lulli; of the opera which in 1680 Racine and Boileau, joint historiographes of Louis XIV., began, and which never saw the light; and of the newly-acted Idylle sur la Paix and the Eglogue de Versailles (1685), written by Quinault, Racine, and Molière.
[47] Even in La Bruyèreʼs lifetime doubts were already expressed about the Iliad being written by Homer.
[48] This Roman orator was Cicero.
[49] La Bruyère adds in a footnote: “Even merely considered as an author.”
[50] Almost every one felt during the seventeenth century a dislike for Gothic architecture.
[51] Probably Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) is meant here. This author had made excellent classical studies in a Jesuit college, but attacked the ancients in his Discours sur LʼEglogue and in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, published together with his Poésies Pastorales in 1688. The paragraph beginning “A man feeds” and ending “nurses” was only printed for the first time in the fourth edition of the “Characters,” published in 1689.
[52] It is generally thought that Charles Perrault (1628-1703), a member of the French Academy, is alluded to, but this seems more than doubtful.
[53] Those “able men” were the dramatist Jean Racine (1639-1699) and the satirist Nicolas Boileau Despréaux (1636-1711).
[54] Zoilus, a Greek grammarian, flourished about 356-336 B.C., and assailed Homer, Plato, Isocrates, and other Greek authors with merciless severity.