GIL VICENTE.--Gil Vicente, a prolific poet who wrote forty-two dramatic
pieces, two thirds in Spanish and the rest in Portuguese, touched every
branch of theatrical literature; he produced religious plays (_autos_),
tragedies, romantic dramas, comedies, and farces. His chief works are
_The Sibyl Cassandra_, _The Widow_, _Amadis de Gaule_, _The Temple of
Apollo_, _The Boat of Hell_. His comedies possess a vivacity that is
Italian rather than Portuguese. Tradition has it that Erasmus learnt
Portuguese for the sole purpose of reading the comedies of Gil Vicente.




CHAPTER XV


THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE

Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Fontenelle, Bayle. Of the
Eighteenth: Poets: La Motte, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. Prose
Writers: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, etc. Of
the Nineteenth Century: Poets: Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Musset, Vigny,
etc.; Prose Writers: Chateaubriand, Michelet, George Sand, Merimee,
Renan, etc.


FONTENELLE.--The eighteenth century, which was announced, and announced
with great precision, by La Bruyere, was inaugurated by his enemy
Fontenelle. Fontenelle, nephew of Corneille, began with despicable
trifles, eclogues, operas, stilted tragedies, letters of a dandy, so he
might be justly regarded as an inferior Voiture. Very soon, because he