assistance. I almost blush to think that M. Despreaux, M. Racine,
and M. de Moliere, the three most renowned wits of the time,
conspired to complete the poor jest, and assail you. Well, bubble
as your poetry was, you may be proud that it needed all these
sharpest of pens to prick the bubble. Other poets, as popular as
you, have been annihilated by an article. Macaulay put forth his
hand, and "Satan Montgomery" was no more. It did not need a
Macaulay, the laughter of a mob of little critics was enough to blow
him into space; but you probably have met Montgomery, and of
contemporary failures or successes I do not speak.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the consensus of criticism ever made
you doubt for a moment whether, after all, you were not a false
child of Apollo? Was your complacency tortured, as the complacency
of true poets has occasionally been, by doubts? Did you expect
posterity to reverse the verdict of the satirists, and to do you
justice? You answered your earliest assailant, Liniere, and, by a
few changes of words, turned his epigrams into flattery. But I
fancy, on the whole, you remained calm, unmoved, wrapped up in
admiration of yourself. According to M. de Marivaux, who reviewed,
as I am doing, the spirits of the mighty dead, you "conceived, on
the strength of your reputation, a great and serious veneration for
yourself and your genius." Probably you were protected by the
invulnerable armour of an honest vanity, probably you declared that
mere jealousy dictated the lines of Boileau, and that Chapelain's
real fault was his popularity, and his pecuniary success,


Qu'il soit le mieux rente de tous les beaux-esprits.