ZOILUS AS ETERNAL AS HOMER.
CHAPTER I.
"Ce courtisan grossier du profane vulgaire."[1]
This Alexandrine is by La Harpe, who hurls it at Shakespeare. Somewhere else La Harpe says, "Shakespeare panders to the mob."
Voltaire, as a matter of course, reproaches Shakespeare with antithesis: that is well. And La Beaumelle reproaches Voltaire with antithesis: that is better.
Voltaire, when he is himself in question, pro domo sua, gets angry. "But," he writes, "this Langleviel, alias La Beaumelle, is an ass. I defy you to find in any poet, in any book, a fine thing which is not an image or an antithesis."
Voltaire's criticism is double-edged. He wounds and is wounded. This is how he characterizes the Ecclesiastes and the Canticle of Canticles: "Works without order, full of low images and coarse expressions."
A little while after, furious, he exclaims,—
"On m'ose préférer Crébillon le barbare!"[2]
An idler of the Œil-de-Bœuf, wearing the red heel and the blue ribbon, a stripling and a marquis,—M. de Créqui,—comes to Ferney, and writes with an air of superiority: "I have seen Voltaire, that childish old man."