The prose is equally saturated with criticism. The dialogue on _Les Héros de Roman_, which Fontenelle could have done admirably, Boileau has not done very well; but his satire on the extraordinary bastard kind of romance with which France at this time deluged Europe is not ill-founded, though rather ill-informed.[375] The Letters are full enough of criticism. But the two chief prose documents from which (at least from their titles) something really important may be expected, are the _Dissertation_ on the story of Giocondo, as told by its inventor and by La Fontaine, and the _Réflexions sur Longin_. These last, however, the reader need hardly trouble himself with: they may even be classed among the impieties of criticism. Boileau, little as he could have appreciated, did at least know the Great Unknown. He translated him; he calls him very truly _le plus grand_, and more questionably _le plus sévère_, of ancient critics. But these _Réflexions_ on Longinus are in fact reflections on Charles Perrault, a very clever person, but not in the least like Longinus: and the texts from the Περὶ Ὕψους, which are put at the head of each chapter, often have nothing to do with the subject at all, and in almost every case might almost as well have been selected from the first book he picked up. In the particular dispute I am with him, and not with Perrault; but the first exclamation of any real lover of the real classics who reads the piece must be _Non tali auxilio_! Boileau, as always, is arrogant and rude; as sometimes elsewhere his scholarship is not beyond suspicion, though it had an easy triumph over the almost total absence of the same quality in his adversary; but, as he is very seldom, he is confused, desultory, heavy. To those who think that criticism is the art of scolding, the _Réflexions sur Longin_ may seem to be a creditable exercise in it: hardly to others. ----- Footnote 375: Even his admirers admit his strange ignoring of the fact that Madeleine de Scudéry _intended_ her personages to be modern—that they were mere disguises of Condé and others, not attempts to re-create antiquity. This of course does not exempt them from blame; but it requires a different sort of blame. -----