If I have seemed, or may seem, too bitter in any remarks on Boileau, let me here observe that few things in literary history are more pathetic than these last years of his, when, _ultimus suorum_, amid the ruins of the political glories which he had celebrated, and in a transition period between the great literature of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth, with no one but his foolish Boswell-Eckermann, Brossette, to comfort him, and no one at all to whom to look as his successor, he held—unconquered and unconquerable—to his principles, and died, as one of the poets to whom he was so unjust had said, “Sans bouger, debout et dans son rang.” ----- The dominance of the literary subject in the _Satires_ is well known, though it is equally notorious that illiberal personality too often takes the place of liberal criticism. [Sidenote: _The_ Satires.] Colletet’s poverty and parasitism; Saint-Amant’s death from fever, brought on by his ill-success (he would have died of hunger anyhow, says the satirist good-naturedly)—these are the subjects that interest him in the First. In the Second to Molière, with oblique censure of, or at least surprise at the easy versification of the dramatist, he bewails (being evidently proud of it) his own studious “difficulty”[373] in rhyming, jests at the stock phrases and _chevilles_ of others from Ménage to Scudéry. Even in the Third—the old bad-dinner satire of Horace and Regnier—he brings in a literary quarrel about Théophile and Ronsard and Quinault. The Fifth, to Dangeau, is one of the few which have hardly any literary touches. But he will drag the luckless Abbé de Pure into the Sixth on the noises and nuisances of Paris, while the Seventh is wholly literary, and is one of the earliest (1663) of his explosions at bad poets, and the Eighth, on the follies of humanity, naturally takes shots at the old target. ----- Footnote 373: That he had taught Racine _rimer difficilement_ is the well-known boast in that uncomplimentary comparison of his pupil with Corneille, by which he appears to have administered a sort of private unction to his soul to atone for his public injustice. -----