This last,[184] the earlier to appear, in 1598, had for author Pierre de Laudun, sometimes spoken of, from a seignory of his, as de Laudun d’Aigaliers. [Sidenote: _Pierre de Laudun._] It is in prose, and its author, who is roundly described by Herr Rücktaschel as a “copyist of the purest water,” diversifies his borrowings from Sibilet, Ronsard, and Pelletier on the one hand, from Scaliger and “Vituperani” on the other, with plentiful examples from his own work; for he had followed one greater man with a _Franciade_ and ante-dated another with a _Horace_. I cannot enter any strong protest against the hard words (not confined to those already quoted) which his German critic bestows on him.[185] His real interest is purely that of symptom and tendency, in which respect he shows a rather odd but not uninstructive mixture. On one side he rejects the Ronsardising coinage of words and adoption of dialect forms, with other Pléiade traits. On another he shows himself recalcitrant to the coming classicastry by declaring that “we are not bound by their laws”—_e.g._, in regard to the number of acts. On a third we find him emphasising this attitude into an absolute refusal of the Unity of Time, against which he says almost all the obvious and sensible things, in a fashion to some extent redeeming what is on the whole the work of a not very intelligent bookmaker. ----- Footnote 184: _L’art Poétique Français_, Paris, 1598. This, like almost all the works noticed in this chapter, is but a little book, odd to compare with the close-packed Italian quartos. But it is longer than most of its fellows. Footnote 185: Some abatement, however, may be claimed, if only on the ground that Laudun is absolutely sound on the vernacular question. -----