Yet other groups or individuals in this abounding period might receive notice if this history were to be in twelve volumes instead of in three. [Sidenote: _Patru, Desmarets, and others._] There is Patru, not merely in his time the glory of the French bar, but extolled, by Boileau and by his enemies alike, as a sort of Quintilian and Quintilius in one[352]—as a standard at once of style and of judgment. Yet his long life and his constant occupation with literature, in talk and in reading, seem to have left us hardly anything in the shape of written criticism. There is Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, a less belauded but more interesting and perhaps more genuine man of letters. Not merely did Desmarets compose the epics ridiculed by Boileau, not merely was he the author of the excellent _Visionnaires_ (the best comedy in French before Molière except Corneille’s _Le Menteur_), not merely was he a “visionary” himself in his latter days, and a versifier, if not a poet, always, but he was a not inconsiderable critic. Those who choose to read his _Défense du Poème Héroique_[353] will find in it by no means the imbecility that they may expect, either in the dialogues defending the Christian poem, or in the somewhat meticulous, but sharp and not ill-deserved, “cutting-up” of Boileau which follows. But these, and much more the Conrarts and the Costars, the Maucroix, and the rest[354] must here be as _silencieux_ as the first in his stock epithet. And one may confess even to doubts whether, with the amplest room and verge, they ought to have much space in a general History of Criticism as distinguished from one of special countries and periods. Hardly any of them is more than one of a _numerus_; hardly any has himself actual distinction, as persons of much inferior talents may have at other times. The Historian of Climate must have much to say about the delightful variety of that phenomenon which the British Isles display, about its causes, its phases, and the like, in general; but he would be lost, and would lose his readers in more than one sense, if he were to attempt to describe every shower or even every wet season.[355] ----- Footnote 352: The suggestion of this, though not the exact phrase, will be found in Sainte-Beuve’s essay (_Causeries du Lundi_, v. 275). Footnote 353: Paris, 1675. Footnote 354: On all these, see Tallemant, Bayle, and others down to Sainte-Beuve. For a typical literary and critical quarrel, beginning politely and ending in something like Billingsgate, nothing can be better than that battle of Costar and M. de Girac, first over the dead body of Voiture and the live one of Balzac, and then over both these departed, which Sainte-Beuve tells in his liveliest manner at pp. 210-231 of the 12th vol. of the _Causeries_. Footnote 355: