The praise of order and consistency gives place to remarks on diction which repeat the Ronsardist canons and cautions, and to a fashionable contempt (to be taken up later, as so much else was, by the thankless Neo-Classics) of Anagrams and Acrostics. [Sidenote: _The First Book._] The usual twinning of Homer and Virgil is succeeded by reference to some other classics: and for a time Vauquelin seems to be confining himself (in so far as his expatiatory manner ever admits confinement) to the _ouvrage héroique_, whence he turns to other kinds, and the verse-forms suitable for them. He repeats Du Bellay’s curse on _ballade_ and _rondeau_,[188] and passes like him to a special eulogy of the Sonnet, in which (as Du Bellay was not able to do) he is able now to produce a stately list of French practitioners. This part of the Book, a little after its middle, is full of literary history and allusion, the latter touching foreign languages and literatures as well as French. And the rest of it is occupied with a fresh and rather disorderly account of styles and kinds, with the verse and diction proper to each, ending up with a curious amplification of Quintilian’s story[189] about Apelles and Antigonus, the moral of which seems to be a sort of _Medio tutissimus ibis_ ----- Footnote 188: _Oste moy la Ballade, oste moy le Rondeau._ Footnote 189: _Inst. Orat._, II. xiii. 13. The anecdote in Quintilian is very simple: Apelles paints Antigonus in profile to hide a lost eye. Vauquelin (on uncertain authority) expands this into a long story of a competition between Polygnotus, Scopas, and Diocles. -----