Vauquelin de la Fresnaye has not this sudden cry of the voice in the desert: but his _Art Poétique_ is, as a whole, a book of infinitely greater interest and value than Laudun’s. Vauquelin was a gentleman and lawyer of Normandy, who, born at the _château_ whence he took his name, near Falaise, fought, amused himself, loved the country and its sports, became President at Caen, and wrote verses of no small merit in various kinds. [Sidenote: _Vauquelin de la Fresnaye._] His _Art Poétique_ was more than thirty years on the stocks: and having had its keel laid in 1574, when the _Pléiade_, though a quarter of a century old, was still in full flourishing, did not get launched till 1605, when a new age had begun in more than chronological fashion. It is a composition of considerable bulk, consisting of three books, each running to rather under twelve hundred lines. Either of deliberation, or as a result of intermittent attention during the time in which it was a-preparing, Vauquelin arranged it (or failed to arrange it) in most admired disorder. The precisians of the next age would have been horrified at the promiscuous character of its observations; and some would have been grateful to its latest editor[186] if, in addition to, or instead of, part of the elaborate and very valuable _apparatus criticus_ of various kinds which he has given, he had prefixed an argument. As it is, we must make one: for the book, if not one of our very greatest _points de repère_, is yet such a point. ----- Footnote 186: M. Pellissier, to whose already cited edition the references following are made. -----