Although M. Bourgoin, and one or two others, have done something of late years to relieve Chapelain himself of the weight—not so much of obloquy as of contemptuous ignoring—which rested on him for nearly two centuries, even they have for the most part lain under that curious fear of Boileau which we shall have to notice so often. [Sidenote: _Chapelain: the hopelessness of his verse._] Sainte-Beuve (who knew his French seventeenth century as no other man ever has known, or probably ever will know it, and who had in his own possession the _MS._ Letters which do Chapelain not a little credit) takes a kind of apologetic tone on the subject, and seems never to have made up his mind to treat Chapelain as a whole. It is, indeed, only on the prose side that he can be approached without fear of disaster. There are good things even in the _Pucelle_, but they are ill to win. You may read Le Moyne, Desmarets, Saint-Amant, not without satisfaction of the true poetic sort, especially in the first case. I think I once got through some part of Scudéry’s _Alaric_. But the _Pucelle_ has a double touch-me-not-ishness—of _niaiserie_, and of what Boileau (for once justly) calls “hardness”; there is something really impregnable about her. And the minor pieces—fine as is the Richelieu Ode in parts—hardly save their captainess. Chapelain as a critic is quite another person. He still writes somewhat heavily: and (among his other faithfulnesses to the Pléiade[316]) goes in the teeth of Malherbe and Vaugelas by his use of classicised words. [Sidenote: _The interest of his criticism._] But he almost deserves the name of the first properly equipped critic of France in point of knowledge: and (shocking as the statement may appear) I am not sure that he was not the last, till almost within the memory of an aged man. Not only did he know Italian literature thoroughly—that was not in his time uncommon for Frenchmen—and Spanish—that also was not far to seek—but he was accurately drilled in the theory and practice of Italian criticism. He is constantly referring to it in his correspondence with Balzac; he (that is to say, the transparently identical author of the main part at least of the Censure of the _Cid_) not merely rests his objections on these critics, but refers to the controversies over the _Gerusalemme_ and the _Pastor Fido_, as he does elsewhere to that between Castelvetro and Caro. Above all, he, almost alone of his time, knew old French literature. It has not been noticed, I think, either by M. Feillet, who published, or by M. Bourgoin, who discusses, his most interesting and remarkable dialogue, _Sur la Lecture des Vieux Romans_, that his devotion to _Lancelot_ was almost certainly one of his debts to Ronsard. For the Prince of Poets, as we saw, expressly enjoined the reading of _Lancelot_ and the other romances in order to enrich the vocabulary. ----- Footnote 316: