Certainly the style is excellent; but it pales and seems nothing more than a very feeble sketch in comparison with the rapid and sombre pencil-strokes of the great Roman painter: "Trepidatur a circumsedentibus, diffugiunt imprudentes; at, quibus altior intellectus, resistunt defixi et Neronem intuentes."
[130] See the letter to Perrault.
En vain contre le Cid ministre se ligue,
Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrique, etc.
* * * * *
Après qu'un peu de terre, obtenu par prière,
Pour jamais dans la tombe eut enfermé Molière, etc.
* * * * *
Aux pieds de cet autel de structure grossière,
Git sans pompe, enfermé dans une vile bière,
Le plus savant mortel qui jamais ait écrit;
Arnaud, qui sur la grâce instruit par Jésus-Christ,
Combattant pour l'Eglise, a, dans l'Eglise même,
Souffert plus d'un outrage et plus d'un anathème, etc.
* * * * *
Errant, pauvre, banni, proscrit, persécuté;
Et même par sa mort leur fureur mal éteinte
N'aurait jamais laissé ses cendres en repos,
Si Dieu lui-même ici de son ouaille sainte
A ces loups dévorants n'avait caché les os.
[133] These verses did not appear till after the death of Boileau, and they are not well known. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, in a letter to Brossette, rightly said that these are "the most beautiful verses that M. Despréaux ever made."
[134] 4th Series of our works, Literature, book i., Preface, p. 3: "It is in prose, perhaps, that our literary glory is most certain.... What modern nation reckons prose writers that approach those of our nation? The country of Shakspeare and Milton does not possess, since Bacon, a single prose writer of the first order [?]; that of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, is in vain proud of Machiavel, whose sound and manly diction, like the thought that it expresses, is destitute of grandeur. Spain, it is true, has produced Cervantes, an admirable writer, but he is alone.... France can easily show a list of more than twenty prose writers of genius: Froissard, Rabelais, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Molière, Retz, La Bruyère, Malebranche, Bossuet, Fénelon, Fléchier, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Mme. de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, J. J. Rousseau; without speaking of so many more that would be in the first rank everywhere else,—Amiot, Calvin, Pasquier, D'Aubigné, Charron, Balzac, Vaugelas, Pélisson, Nicole, Fleury, Bussi, Saint-Evremont, Mme. de Lafayette, Mme. de Maintenon, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues, Hamilton, Le Sage, Prévost, Beaumarchais, etc. It may be said with the exactest truth, that French prose is without a rival in modern Europe; and, even in antiquity, superior to the Latin prose, at least in the quantity and variety of models, it has no equal but the Greek prose, in its palmiest days, in the days of Herodotus and Demosthenes. I do not prefer Demosthenes to Pascal, and it would be difficult for me to put Plato himself above Bossuet. Plato and Bossuet, in my opinion, are the two greatest masters of human language, with manifest differences, as well as more than one trait of resemblance; both ordinarily speak like the people, with the last degree of simplicity, and at moments ascending without effort to a poetry as magnificent as that of Homer, ingenious and polished to the most charming delicacy, and by instinct majestic and sublime. Plato, without doubt, has incomparable graces, the supreme serenity, and, as it were, the demi-smile of the divine sage. Bossuet, on his side, has the pathetic, in which he has no rival but the great Corneille. When such writers are possessed, is it not a religion to render them the honor that is their due, that of a regular and profound study?"
[135] See the [Appendix], at the end of the volume.
[136] See the [Appendix].