Two writers at least, whom few would call lesser men of letters than Boileau, and in whom some may see greater qualifications for criticism, must be much more briefly dealt with, partly because in their case no controversy is needed, partly because their actual contributions to criticism form but a very small part of their work, and partly also because neither aimed at for himself, or has received from posterity and tradition, any very prominent place as a critic. [Sidenote: _La Bruyère and Fénelon._] These are La Bruyère and Fénelon. It would not be correct to say that either is in deliberate or conscious opposition to the _législateur du Parnasse_. Their general conscious principles are much the same as his; they are, like him, uncompromising defenders of the Ancients, and though Fénelon has a private crotchet about poetic prose, yet the non-essentiality of verse to poetry had been a general, if not a universal, tenet with antiquity. But whether in consequence of that impatience of despotism which those who love to mix literary and political history have seen in the second generation of the _siècle de Louis XIV._, as compared with the first; or from the fact that, as compared with Boileau, they were much more of Greek,[380] and less of purely Latin students; or simply as a result of what has been justly attributed to both,[381] the predominance of the _sens propre_ over mere observation of the _communis sensus_—it is certain that both, and especially Fénelon, display much more individualism, and at the same time much more catholicity. It may be added that they know more, and are to some extent (though to no large one) free from that hopeless ignoring of older French literature which was Boileau’s greatest fault. ----- Footnote 380: “Greek, the Alpha and Omega of all knowledge,” as Dr Folliott calls it, is certainly not less so in criticism than elsewhere. Footnote 381: By M. Bourgoin in the interesting book cited above. -----