It was unlikely, or rather impossible, that so revolutionary a challenge should lack its answer, which duly appeared a year later under the odd title of _Le Quintil Horatien_.[170] [Sidenote: _The_ Quintil Horatien.] This used to be attributed to Charles Fontaine, a poet of parts; but it seems that he repudiated it, and it is now handed over to a pedagogue of the name of Aneau. It is a dogged little book, which treats the _Défense_ very much as if it were an impertinent school exercise, and goes through it with the lead pencil in a fashion at once laborious, ineffectual, and suggestive of a vain desire to substitute the birch rod. The author, whoever he was, might have found plenty of things to say against Du Bellay, and he is on fairly solid ground when he indignantly protests that William of Lorris, Chartier, Villon, and others were not the artless clowns, or positive sinners, that this petulant-sparkling star of the Pléiade had looked awry upon. But even here his own ignorance of the still better things before the _Rose_ disabled him: and it is by no means certain that he would have had the wit to appreciate them if he had known them. He thinks the sonnet too “easy,” poor man! condemns the elegy on the absurd ground that it saddens the reader; and (committing the same fault in defence which more modern critics have committed in attack) bases his main, if not his whole, praise of _Ballade_ and _Chant Royal_, _Rondeau_ and _Rondel_, on their mere difficulty. But his most unfortunate, if not his most absurd, error was the line which, in common with most respectable persons, both then and since, he takes up against the _verbum inusitatum_, as shown in the new poetic diction of the _Pléiade_. This was doubly unlucky: first, because the fifteenth-century poets whom he champions had themselves “aureated” the language in or out of all conscience already; and secondly, because this kind of criticism, whether it be applied to Montaigne or Dryden, to Carlyle or Browning, is always a dangerous delusion. Very classical critics have pecked and mocked at the author of the _Quintil Horatien_ because he black-marks not merely words useful or beautiful, like _sinueux_, _oblivieux_, _rasséréner_, but even such now sterling coin as _liquide_ and _patrie_. It would be well if they, or those like them, would think twice before condemning, as neologisms, terms which may not impossibly seem as much matter of course to the twenty-fourth century as _patrie_ does to the twentieth. But the author of the _Quintil_ is really of that breed of carping critics which carps itself out of all common-sense. He makes ponderous fun of the initial signature I. D. B. A. (“J. du Bellay Angevin”); objects to the statement that “nature gave us _tongues_ to speak,” because Aristotle, Galen, and Petrus Hispanus agree that palate, throat, lips, and teeth are also necessary to the process; to the use of _voix_ instead of _son_, where animals are not concerned.