Still less can Boileau be allowed any credit for the great achievements which undoubtedly took place during his own middle life. The glories of French literature in verse (and, as far as the three first go, in poetry), about 1664, are Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Molière. Corneille had been writing before Boileau was born: the only piece of his which Boileau praises generously was produced in the year of the critic’s birth; and that critic is silent about most of the Master’s work, and sneers ignobly at its later examples. The magnificent genius of Molière owed nothing to Boileau in its beginnings, and accepted little, if anything, from his criticism in its perfection; while not all of its results were cordially welcomed by the critic, personal friends as they were. La Fontaine, an older man than Boileau by fifteen years, was still more independent of him at the beginning, shows extremely little mark of any influence from him at any time, and, for all their friendship, experienced from him the almost unaccountable omission of his favourite kind, the Fable (unlike the _Conte_, a perfectly “unobjectionable” one), in the _Art Poétique_ itself. There remains Racine, and, if the schooling and training of Racine seem to any one so great a thing that his schoolmaster and trainer becomes, _ipso facto_, one of the _Di majores_ of criticism, there is not much more to be said. But there is something: and it is this. In the first place, to assume that Racine’s genius could not have made its own way without Boileau’s mentorship, is to pay a far worse compliment to that genius than some not very fervent Racinians can allow; and, in the second, the spirit, if not the letter, of his criticism is against that of Racine’s very best work. If I cared to do so, I think I could show that _Phèdre_ herself comes within the Bolæan[379] maledictions. As for _Athalie_, the very admirers of Boileau have asked how, after his unsparing censure of the religious epic, he could tolerate the religious drama? ----- Footnote 379: Cf. _Bolæana._ On the other hand, the Rev. J. Garbett, whom anti-Tractarian feeling made Professor of Poetry at Oxford when Isaac Williams was a candidate, has “Bollevian” (_De Re Critica Prælectiones_, Oxford, 1847, _Præl._ iv. i.) I am not bigoted on the point. -----