[108] Sophocles (495-406 B.C.), Euripides (480-406 B.C.)
[109] Cassius Longinus (213-273), a Greek orator, philosopher, and author, is chiefly known by his “Treatise on the Sublime,” which is generally attributed to him. In it he states that there are five principal sources of the sublime, and that the third is nought but the figures of speech turned about in a certain manner. Boileauʼs translation of this “Treatise” appeared in 1674, and in his preface he described but did not define the sublime, a definition also not found in Longinus.
[110] The original has capable, in the sense of the Latin capax.
[111] According to Boileau, Longinus does not understand by “sublime” a sublime style, but something extraordinary and marvellously striking, which causes a work to enrapture, delight, and transport us. A sublime style always requires grand, eloquent words; but the sublime may be found in a single thought, a single figure of speech, a single phrase. Longinus himself says that anything which leaves us food for thought, which almost carries us away, and of which the remembrance is lasting, is sublime.
[112] In rhetoric there is a difference between a metaphor and a comparison.
[113] The above paragraph is said to refer to the polemical writings interchanged between the Jesuits and Jansenists, and seems not quite fair to Pascalʼs Lettres Provinciales.
[114] Some “Keys” mention the names of Bouhours and Bourdaloue, whilst more modern commentators think that La Bruyère only wished to give a paragraph on the French prose of his time.
[115] The original has artisan, which even in La Bruyèreʼs time meant an artisan, when used without being qualified; our author employs it, however, for “artist.”
[116] Some annotators say a certain Abbé Bourdelon (1653-1730), a completely forgotten critic, was meant; others think it was a hit at Ménage (1613-1692), who had the good sense not to recognise himself in this portrait, and is said to have been also the original of Vadius in Molièreʼs Femmes Savantes.
[117] This author was the Abbé de Villiers, who published in 1682 a poem in four cantos, LʼArt de Précher, in which he tried to imitate LʼArt poétique of Boileau, and in 1690 Réflexions sur les défauts dʼautrui, which were very successful; some suppose Father Bouhoursʼ Pensées ingénieuses des anciens et des modernes (1689) hinted at; whilst M. G. Servois, the able editor of La Bruyère in the Grands Ecrivains de la France (1865-1878), thinks that possibly the “author” was Jacques Brillon, a lawyer and indefatigable imitator, who in his youth may have been presumptuous enough to have asked La Bruyèreʼs advice on some of his literary works, the Portraits sérieux, etc., the LʼOuvrage nouveau dans le goût des Caractères de Théophraste et des Pensées de Pascal, the Théophraste moderne, etc., which three books appeared, however, after La Bruyèreʼs death, from 1696 to 1700. Adrien Baillet, an erudite scholar and fertile author, is also mentioned by some “Keys.”