Chapelain’s other critical exercises are numerous: they are quite interesting, and there ought to be some accessible collection of them, for at present they have to be hunted up in half-a-dozen different books or collections, some of them very hard to get at. [Sidenote: _Prefaces._] It is probable, though disputed, that he wrote the Introduction to a translation of _Guzman d’Alfarache_, which may have been done in his twentieth year, and in which the author (according to the Pléiade view) by no means magnifies his office as translator. He certainly wrote, some years later, the prefatory panegyric to Marini’s _Adone_, where he practises, in a fashion familiar to students of Italian criticism, an elaborate scholastic division of kinds and qualities, with definitions and connections of them. [Sidenote: Sur les Vieux Romans.] We need not trouble ourselves with his Academic discourse, against Love and for Glory, which is full of _précieuse_ personification, but pass to his most interesting works, the _Dialogue on the Romances_ and the critical _Letters_. In the first[320] he maintains the case of the Arthurian romances against Ménage and Sarrasin, not with a thorough-going championship (that would be wholly anachronistic), but with singular sense, knowledge, and even, as far as it goes, appreciation. He does not affect to admire the composition or the style in _Lancelot_. But he knows something of the origin (it is extraordinary that he allows it to be, in part at least, English). He will not allow that, barring style and expression, there is any necessary gulf between _Lancelot_ and Homer (wherein he is a hundred years ahead in sense of Blair, who was a hundred years ahead of him in time), delights (taught to do so, as we said, by Ronsard) in the vocabulary, and feels and rejoices in the point of honour (“la crainte perpetuelle qu’ils ont de rien faire et de rien dire dont leur reputation puisse souffrir la moindre tache”),[321] their jealousy of their word, their devotion (so different from “our _galanterie_”) to their ladies. _Quia multum amavit!_ Moreover, the document is connected in a rather fascinating manner with another,[322] in which the same interlocutors, with others, appear, which refers to it, and in which not only does Sarrasin confess that he had been brought by Chapelain to a state of mind different from that which is to be seen in his _Discours_ noticed below, but Chapelain himself reinforces his argument with a long citation from, and discussion of, an episode in _Perceforest_—that huge and interesting romance which is almost inaccessible to modern readers, in consequence of the depraved persistence of modern scholars and Societies in reprinting the same text in idle emulation of each other, instead of giving what are practically _anecdota_. ----- Footnote 320: