_De la lecture des Vieux Romans_, ed. Feillet, Paris, 1870. Unfortunately printed in very small numbers, but still obtainable for less than half its weight in silver. Footnote 321: It is really refreshing to find Mr. Burke saying ditto to M. Chapelain some 150 years afterwards, in a sentence as well known to all the world as that in the text is unknown to all but a few. Footnote 322: _S’il faut qu’un Jeune Homme soit Amoureux._ Sarrasin, _Œuvres_, _ed. cit. inf._, 139-235. ----- The Letters (published, with some omissions, by M. Tamizey de la Roque in 1880, and supplemented fourteen years later by some more in the Transactions of a learned Society[323]) are crammed with references to books, and contain not a little real criticism. [Sidenote: _Letters, &c._] And lastly, the famous list[324] of characterisations of French men of letters which Chapelain drew up for Colbert’s use in allotting pensions, though it has been laughed at in parts, is for its date (some of its subjects, including Molière, had not yet done anything like their best work) as sound, as sensible, and, at the same time, as benevolent a hand-list of the kind as you shall discover in the records of the centuries. ----- Footnote 323: _Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire_, vol. xxi., Paris, 1894. Footnote 324: This, with other things, will be found in Chapelain’s _Mélanges de Littérature_ (Paris, 1726). ----- On the whole we may say that Chapelain only wanted the proverbial “That!” to make a good and perhaps a really great critic. Not all, though a good deal, of the deficiency must be put down to the transition character of time, taste, literary diction, and everything, in midst of which he found himself. The point of critical genius, the ability to grasp and focus and methodise, must have been wanting too. But he had knowledge, both of literature and of criticism; he had obviously catholic, if not unerring, sympathies; he had acuteness and penetration, if not quite combination and the architectonic; and he was entirely free from that ill-nature which, while it may seem to assist the critic, really disables him. _Critique manqué_, perhaps, on the whole; but still on his day a critic and no mean one.