Nor can we afford much space to the main body of the Academicians, of the frequenters of “the” Hotel (_par excellence_), of the abbés, and _marquis_, and even _marquises_ who crowd the middle of the seventeenth-century history of France, not disagreeably for posterity. [Sidenote: _Tallemant, Pellisson, Ménage, Madame de Sévigné._] They must be sought in Tallemant (himself, as citations will have shown, interested in the matter, and not inept at it) as a main and single preserver, in a hundred other places, original and second-hand, from the contemporary records to the essays of Sainte-Beuve and his followers. We could fill this volume with them without the slightest difficulty; but, as in all true history, they must “speak by their foremen,” and even these foremen cannot have much place. The modest and amiable Pellisson, the historian of the Academy, whose personal ugliness Boileau had the insolent vulgarity to satirise,[340] but who had a “soul of gold,” was by no means a bad though a too amiable critic, and had the sense and courage not to deny Ronsard when the fashion turned against him, just as he clove to Fouquet when it was positively, and even extremely, dangerous to do so. Ménage, to whom his own unguardedness and the satire of Molière[341] have given something of a ridiculous position in literary history, had the wit to see the merit of Molière himself quite early, possessed very wide reading, and could make judicious reflections on it, had studied the Italian critics,[342] and could now and then (as in the brief obituary notice of Scarron[343]) hit off his stroke extremely well. As for Marie de Sévigné, adorable to all, and especially adored by these two, she is generally right, and always illustrates the saying of La Bruyère, which is quoted below, whether she is right or not. But her critical position is so close to that of Saint-Evremond that what we have said of him is almost equally applicable to her, though she invests the critical attitude with her own peculiar charm. ----- Footnote 340: In the 8th satire. He had the extremely small grace, however, to drop the _name_ in later editions, and it does not now appear. Footnote 341: _If_ the “Vadius” of the _Femmes Savantes_ is Ménage. He himself denied it rather cleverly; but there is not much doubt. Footnote 342: See what he says on Castelvetro in the _Ménagiana_ (ed. La Monnoye, Amsterdam, 1713), ii. 86. Footnote 343: Ibid., ii. 174. -----